Special feature

Information and Human Society
The New Relationship Between Society and Media

Reduce difficulty in understanding databy ingenious presentations of data
In recent years, new forms of media such as the Web and Twitter have emerged, and information communicatedby politicians, businesspeople, and researchers is considered to have news value on many occasions. Scientific data,on the other hand, has also been disclosed, but their use by the general public is still limited due to difficulty inunderstanding the meaning of data. Research is underway to surmount this situation so that information isconveyed to the general public in an easy-to-understand way. The outcomes of this research were also utilized totackle with the Great East Japan Earthquake.

Conveying scientific
data to people in aneasy-to-understand way
A project called "Digital Typhoon" *1
is going on with the aim of developing acomprehensive collection of all kinds ofdata related to typhoons. Accumulated
data includes image data of meteorological satellites “Himawari” since 1979,
typhoon track data since 1951 and Au­
tomated Meteorological Data Acqu­isition System (AMeDAS) data since
1976, and it has developed into one of
the world’s largest scale database ontyphoons. Project leader, Dr. Kita­moto,
Associate Professor of Digital Contentand Media Sciences Research Division,NII, states: “We hope to make thesescientific data, accumulated over a long

Asanobu Kitamoto
Associate Professor, Digital Content and Media
Sciences Research Division, NII

8period, available not only for scientists,
but also widely to the general public.
Recently we also study methods forconveying data to people in an easy-tounderstand way.”
As a solution, Dr. Kitamoto focuses on
methods for indicating the meaning ofinformation using a large volume ofdata as evidence. For example, when theintensity of a typhoon is presented, ran­king information such as “the XXthstrongest typhoon in history” is prese­
nted with numeric values. Ranking
information may be easier to interpret
even when the meaning of numericvalue itself is complicated. “But this isnot enough,” says Dr. Kitamoto. He has
succeeded in attracting people’s atten­
tion with diverse search and visuali­zation functions that provide a historicalcontext to understand the meaning ofdata with links to a wide range of related
information to enrich the context.
“Digital Typhoon aims to establish an
information environment in whichusers can refer to scientific data anytime
they need,” says Dr. Kitamoto. “Somepeople may not be satisfied with asimple form of information, such as theXXth in history. They may want to exp­
lore related situations, or broaden theirscope of interest after searching, forinstance, for the strongest typhoon inhistory. Providing scientific data as areference, Digital Typhoon can be used
not only as a useful database for inqu­isitive people, but also as a system forraising new interests”.

Supporting people with
scientific data during
the aftermath ofthe earthquake
He proposes an approach to use realtime data for understanding ongoing
phenomenon to make evidence-based
decisions, and he applies the same
approach to other cases than typhoons.
Facing with a tragic situation after theGreat East Japan Earthquake, Dr.
Kitamoto thought about how he cancontribute to recovery from the disasterusing his experience with Digital
Typhoon.
“When radioactive materials werereleased from Fukushima Daiichi
Nuclear Power Plant, many people weresearching on the Internet looking forwind direction information,” says
Kitamoto. “I realized that people wanted
easy-to-understand and reliable winddirection information that can be usedas evidence for predicting the dispersionof radioactive materials.”
He then prepared “Wind Map around
Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear PowerPlant,” displaying wind direction andspeed using GPV (meso-scale model)*2,
data from a numerical weather predi­
ction model of Japan MeteorologicalAgency. Arrow directions and colors on
Google maps show the wind direction
and speed respectively, and the center ofthe map was set to Fukushima Daiichi
NPP. The map was released on March
22. This wind map may be different

Wind Map around
Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant
The map, released after the earth­quake by Dr. Kitamoto, shows winddirection and speed in the vicinityof Fukushima Daiichi nuclear po­
wer plant. The pin indicates thelocation of the plant. Wind direc­
tion is shown by the direction ofarrows and wind speed by the colorof arrows. Blue shows a gentle wind and higher wind speed isrepre­sented by green and red in that order.

Twitter account (Tweets in English)
Digital Typhoon@DigitalTyphoonE

Wind Map around Fukushima
Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant@wind_f1_enfrom real observations because this isbased on simulation data, but he expla­
ined this problem on his blog post sothat users can interpret the data pro­
perly based on comparisons. Past andfuture data can also be shown by
moving the slider at the top of the map.
Here, all the visualizations are based ondata from Japan Meteorological Agency.
“Looking at tweets on Twitter, we cansee that many people are using this map
for making decisions in their daily lives,
such as whether to wear a protective
mask or to hang laundry outside,” says
Dr. Kit amoto. “S ome res e archers
requested me to provide past data to
study the mechanism of hot-spot
generation. In fact, there are only a few
websites, even today, that compile past
mete orolog ic a l d at a or ma ke t hedatabase of them. ”

Utilizing experiences fromthe Great East Japan
Earthquake for researchin the future
The map of wind direction and speed
around the Fukushima Daiichi NPP has
attracted a great deal of public attention,
but this is just one way to use the map.

URL http://agora.ex.nii.ac.jp/earthquake/201103-eastjapan/weather/gpv/wind/index.html.en“This map is a general-purpose tool,
rather than a special tool designed forthe accident at Fukushima Daiichi. The
wind direction and speed map covers
the whole area of Japan, so any place
can be used as the center, with a pin,”says Dr. Kitamoto. By changing the loc­
ation of the pin, we can provide the mapof wind direction and speed for othernuclear-related facilities. This map isnow being extended to include preci­
pitation and other meteorological data.
In addition to the map of wind dire­ction and speed, Dr. Kitamoto is also
working on the development of a tool
for mapping news articles related to theearthquake. “By mapping news articles
on the map, we can perceive the occur­
rences of events at different places in amore intuitive manner. We wanted torelease this tool immediately after theearthquake, but unfortunately we could
not make it. But we have been working
on archiving news articles for making
the long-term records of the earthqu­ake,” says Dr. Kitamoto.
These tools were built rapidly to catch
up with the unexpected earthquake, andthis experience suggested him several
clues for the future development of
Digital Typhoon, which he has beenworking.
“During the time of disaster, people
want to get information related to theprojection of the future, in addition toinformation about the current situa­tion,” says Dr. Kitamoto. “For example,
we observed higher needs for informa­tion on the forecast of wind direction,and other information about the future.
We are planning to summarize ourexperience during the earthquake andfeed it back to Digital Typhoon, with
the idea of extending the system forfuture information.”
The project seems to have progressedfrom analyzing real-time information toanalyze the present situation to a phaseof exploring new directions. Will it be areference to the future using informa­tion about the past and present asevidences? Future developments seemto hold a great deal of promise.
(Written by Kaoru Watanabe)
Typhoon:*1 Digital
http://agora.ex.nii.ac.jp/digital-typhoon/
prediction model grid point value*2 Numerical( G P V; m e s o - s c a l e m o d e l ) : N u m e r i c a l
prediction is a method for predicting thefuture atmospheric state, by calculatingchanges in wind, temperature and otherfactors via computer. The meso-scale model
predicts meteorological phenomena in areas
around Japan for up to 33 hours in advance.

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