GeoTopics is a service that daily examines news reportage from the websites of a growing number of large, elite English-language news operations (you can see the list by clicking on News Media Included). Its contribution is to help identify the "hot topics," and the most frequently referenced places, found that day in this very large collection of reports. The goal is to help you look at what's going on worldwide in either of two ways: what places are relevant to a topic, or what topics are hot in a place.

GeoTopics ranks topics and places by the number of references found to them that day. It automatically compares these to the previous days' results, flags new topics that emerged that day, and tells you whether ongoing topics seem to be getting more or less attention than the day before. For each days' topics and places, clicking on them gets you both the full set of reports under that heading and a breakdown of those reports (i.e., reports on each topic are broken down by places referenced, and reports on places are broken down by topics referenced).

You can scroll back through GeoTopics' archives to look at its analyses of preceding days, back to the point where we first started running it.

GeoTopics is not a search engine. It does not necessarily find the topic or the specific document of your dreams. What it is, is a special-purpose Information Analysis Service - an aid to help you quickly get a feel for what might be interesting to look at more closely within a large set of material. It was built by drawing upon a much more powerful and general-purpose system: GeoWorlds.

GeoTopics is very much a work-in-progress. You cannot expect it to work flawlessly. Just as a search engine sometimes dredges up things that don't seem at all connected to what you had in mind, GeoTopics has its share of bloopers. Sometimes the topics it finds may seem strange. Sometimes the categorization of an article or report is, well, mysterious (although often something interesting is in the article - just one click away). Often, though, the lists it returns both make intuitive sense as to what you expect the stories to be - but also offer some interesting surprises. The idea is to try to supplement intuition by letting the news data itself organize itself and be displayed in a way that helps highlight the unexpected.

We are actively seeking feedback about the interest and usefulness of GeoTopics, as well as any suggestions you may have for ways to make it more powerful and useful.

Click here for a summary of the technology specifically underlying GeoTopics.

For details on the more powerful and general-purpose underlying technology, see the GeoWorlds site.

Please send your comments/suggestions on GeoTopics to: GeoTopics@isi.edu