100 news @ wall projection

Abstract

The use of RSS benefits users by avoiding the repetitive actions of going to visit individual website for up-to-date contents. However, this also introduces the problem of information overloading and overwhelming. With the attempt to eliminate secondary or irrelevant information while preserving the most significant and representative data within the RSS feeds subscribed, this project aims to deliver an interactive information system that summarizes the 100 top news keywords for the past hour.

In our implementation process, we first developed a Java-based RSS aggregator that constantly monitors, downloads and parses a list of subscripted feeds. Then a word frequency analysis scheme was incorporated to interpret the top 100 keywords for the past hour and retrieve the related pictures and news stories for each keyword. Lastly, a Web based user interface was written in PHP to present the hourly generated textual and imagery results though a dynamic and interactive experience.

The resultant data provided by the integrated system offers a reasonably precise definition of the world for the past hour. Moving forward, further improvement and refinement can be carried out in the area of text mining, information retrieval and mobile interactivity.