Speaker: Daniel Steinböck (ICGA)
The aim of this thesis is the development of an interactive web-based visual exploration interface for the Austrian Media Transparency Database. The focus lies on an overview visualization of the underlying database with the possibility to filter the data further and also allowing a detailed analysis of selected organizations. The overview visualization should consist of a bipartite network graph, where the governmental and media organizations are displayed as nodes and the advertising revenues between them as edges. The amount of nodes and edges makes it necessary to develop an abstract view of the graph, otherwise there is no acceptably exploration possible due to visual clutter. Filters should make it feasible to search and select certain organizations and compare them with each other. In addition, a detail-view should provide the possibility to see changes of advertising expenses for the selected organization over time. The overview visualization will make it possible to reveal potential groups of governmental organizations that can in influence press opinion through funding and advertising as well as indicate how the overall advertising situation changed over time. With the detail-view it will be possible to answer organization specific question like "Where did X get funding from?", "Did Y advertise more in election years?" or "How are Z's annual advertising expenses distributed?". To evaluate the visualization and compare it with other approaches a user study and result inspections will be conducted.