The ECOresearch Network has just released US Election 2008 Web Monitor, a geotagged news archive on the US Presidential Election. The system gathers and annotates documents from blogs, environmental organizations, the Fortune 1000 and news media from the US, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand. Processing these sites yields more than 800,000 documents each week.

The tightly coupled interface integrates geographic maps with information landscapes, ontology graphs and tag clouds to reveal both geographical and semantic relationships. Each visualization is implemented as a Web Map Service and displayed via OpenLayers. Besides geotagging the documents, the system identifies (i) attention by counting references to a candidate, (ii) sentiment towards a candidate by looking for co-occurring positive and negative expressions, (iii) keywords reflecting the most important topics associated with a candidate. The weekly statistics are available here. Screencast demonstrating the major components.