Making Sense of the Arab Revolution and Occupy: Visual Analytics to Understand Events

Knowledge on the Web comes in ever larger amounts and in a wider variety of structure and semantics that ever before. In order to exploit this knowledge in different applications, many researchers investigate techniques for making sense of Web data. Objects that the techniques try to identify and extract are, for example, people, organizations, and locations. Many applications though observe how events play an increasingly more important role. Capturing and extracting events for sense making analysis is what this research is aiming for, and in this paper we present the first results and contributions from our research. We consider how events get extracted, how they get conceptualized, and how visual analytics helps to make sense of the represented events. All of this is illustrated in a representative example where driven by questions from social scientists we apply our pipeline to the domain of activism, e.g. Occupy, Arab Revolution.