Climate change is a heated discussion topic in public arenas such as social media. Both texts and visuals play key roles in the debate, as they can complement, contradict, or reinforce each other in nuanced ways. It is therefore urgently needed to study the messages as multimodal objects to better understand the polarized debate about climate change impacts and policies. Multimodal representation models such as CLIP are known to be able to transfer knowledge across domains and modalities, enabling the investigation of textual and visual semantics together. Yet they are not directly able to distinguish the nuances between supporting and sceptic climate change stances. This paper explores a simple but effective strategy combining modality fusion and domain-knowledge enhancing to prepare CLIP-based models with knowledge of climate change stances. A multimodal Dutch Twitter dataset is collected and experimented with the proposed strategy, which increased the macro-average F1 score across stances from 51% to 86%. The outcomes can be applied in both data science and public policy studies, to better analyse how the combined use of texts and visuals generates meanings during debates, in the context of climate change and beyond. ... Read more

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has imposed strict requirements for data sharing, one of which is informed consent. A common way to request consent online is via cookies. However, commonly, users accept online cookies
unaware of the meaning of the given consent and the following implications. Once consent is given, the cookie "disappears", and one forgets that consent was given in the first place. Retrieving cookies and consent logs becomes challenging, as most information is stored in the specific internet browser’s logs. To make users aware of the data sharing implied by cookie consent and to support transparency and traceability within systems, we present a knowledge graph (KG) based tool for personalised cookie consent information visualisation. The KG is based on the OntoCookie ontology, which models cookies in a machine- readable format and supports data interpretability across domains. Evaluation results confirm that the users’ comprehension of the data shared through cookies is vague and insufficient. Furthermore, our work has resulted in an increase of 47.5% in the users’ willingness to be cautious when viewing cookie banners before giving consent. These and other evaluation results confirm that our cookie data visualisation tool helps increase users’ awareness of cookies and data sharing. ... Read more

The adoption of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has resulted in a significant shift in how the data of European Union citizens is handled. A variety of data sharing challenges in scenarios such as smart cities have arisen, especially when attempting to semantically represent GDPR legal bases, such as consent, contracts and the data types and specific sources related to them. Most of the existing ontologies that model GDPR focus mainly on consent. In order to represent other GDPR bases, such as contracts, multiple ontologies need to be simultaneously reused and combined, which can result in inconsistent and conflicting knowledge representation. To address this challenge, we present the smashHitCore ontology. smashHitCore provides a unified and coherent model for both consent and contracts, as well as the sensor data and data processing associated with them. The ontology was developed in response to real-world sensor data sharing use cases in the insurance and smart city domains. The ontology has been successfully utilised to enable GDPR-complaint data sharing in a connected car for insurance use cases and in a city feedback system as part of a smart city use case. ... Read more