Virtual Water Trade

VIRTUAL WATER TRADE

Summary 1. CONTROVERSY 1.1. Virtual water 1.2. Virtual water trade

2. PROTOCOL 2.1. overview 2.2. sources of information 2.3. different perspectives 2.4. linked pages 2.5. the real actors 2.6. interest 3. ULTIMATE VISUALIZATION

4. CONCLUSIONS

1. Controversy The report of IPCC “Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability� suggests 2050 scenarios about freshwater on worldwide scale: excluding from the forecast the more catastrophic and the most optimistic hypotheses, it is evident that some states, for natural reasons, will come to have up to 30% less water than today, while some other states will have 10% more.

The report shows a concept which is not very well-known but equally relevant, about the mechanism of water trade: the virtual water (John Anthony Allan, 1993) Based on the fact that there is no way to change the natural course of events, it is clear that what is necessary is to invest on infrastructures, in order to distribute water more efficiently than today and with the aim of limiting today’s wastes.

Our research has focused on water management and particularly on the virtual water trade, a concept that is a natural consequence of the idea of virtual water, developed by Allan, who was awarded the Stockholm Water Prize in 2008 by the Stockholm International Water Institute.

For this reason the controversy we analyzed focuses on the trade of virtual water, highlighting the chance that the virtual water trade might be considered a concrete solution to the problem of water crisis; our aim is not to take sides in the debate, but rather to investigate the issue and to frame the dispute providing targeted views of data gatherted using digital tools.

1.1. VIRTUAL WATER

1.2. Virtual water trade

The concept of virtual water, first introduced by John Anthony Allan in 1993, corresponds to the volume of freshwater used to produce a good or a service. Allan says that each product embeds a non-physical amount of water, which is the total amount of water used along the production process of the good.

As mentioned previously, the idea of Virtual water trade originated from the idea of virtual water: through import/export of agricultural products, nations trade also virtual water [Fig.1].

The concept of virtual water trade is based of scientific principle. It’s considered as a real alternative source of water (in addition to the natural ones) and as an instrument through which a new balance between states, in terms of water, can be created.

If a country imports a product, it “saves” a part of local water that would be used to produce it. Theoretically, in this way, countries with water scarcity can face the shortage of natural water resources importing virtual water, so that natural water can be used in other fields different from agriculture.

One more relevant thing is to highlight that the virtual water embedded in a product is measured in the place where it was made, because the amount of water needed to produce the goods varies depending on several factors, according to the native country.

Therefore, it would be more logical for a State with reduced water resources to focus on the production of goods with a low virtual water level, importing those with a higher virtual water value. This might lead to a globally significant water preservation - or at least it’s what some researchers believe: virtual water trade between nations would contribute to the mitigation of global water scarcity.

Nowadays this concept is strictly related to agricultural products, since the computation of this value is still rough and too complex for industrial products or for services.

To better understand: 100 grams of apple, on average, potentially contain 70 liters of virtual water; 500 grams of wheat about 500 liters and 300 grams of beef up to 4500 liters.

This potential is not yet reflected in today’s reality: many countries with problems of water scarcity import low volumes of virtual water (e.g. Iran) while others “naturally” richer benefit from large amounts of virtual water (e.g. Indonesia).

Moreover, some researchers are strongly against the rise of the popularity of the virtual water trade as a solution to the water crisis, claiming that it is a dangerous palliative: water-poor countries would find themselves totally dependent on water-rich ones, remaining completely devoid of infrastructures which are needed for any self-sufficient water management.

In this perspective, the global trade of goods will always be based on the idea we have today instead of looking at worldwide trade as a potential way of a global gain and at virtual water as a common good.

Net virtual water import Gm3 -900 / -400 -400/-100 -100/0 0/100 100/500

Fig. 1

Net virtual water import today.

2. Protocol The protocol we defined, is designed to answer to the following research question: ›› Is there a relation between the countries that generate or receive information about virtual water trade and the countries directly involved in this trend?

In order to answer this question, we organized a path based on more specific questions, that helped us to establish several key steps for the final definition of the protocol [Figure 2]: ›› which countries are sources of information on “virtual water trade”? ›› in which perspective do they talk about it? ›› who is connected to the main web pages that deal with the issue? ›› which countries are quoted in the web and, because of that, involved in the issue? ›› what is the interest that different countries express (via their websites) about “virtual water trade”?

For different reasons, only some of these questions found an answer.

To obtain complete and accurate answers, we used many digital tools, whose work and results have always been closely observed.

Step by step, we had to make arbitrary selection choices, but always trying to be consistent and practical.

›› no blog ›› no booksellers

“virtual water trade” Google.com

first 100 results

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MANUAL selection

most cited authors

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alchemy api word counter

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VISUALIZATION

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issue geographer

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virtual water trade

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LEGEND gephy FINEO COMPARISON

failed reasoning/process comparison final visualization

fIRST PART instrument steps operation

SECOND PART final process final points connection to instrument/operation internal comparison blind alley

Fig. 2

Protocol scheme.

2.1. OVERVIEW In order to develop the protocol, it was necessary to investigate and understand the current World condition about water resources of each nation in relation to their attitude in the context of virtual water trade: the aim of the first visualization is to contextualize the attitude of each country in order to draw an overall vision of the condition of the world today.

The analysis and the comprehension of both the virtual water trade phenomenon and the water availability of involved countries cannot be considered distinctly.

The scatter plot [Fig.3] represents both the amount of virtual water exported by each State and their natural water resources.

The graph links these two values, so that the position of each country represents the contexualized condition of the nation in terms of virtual water trade.

The x-axis shows the Net Virtual Water Export per capita. Beeing this the result of virtual water exported minus the imported one, the negative values correspond to countries that import more virtual water than they export, and vice versa .

On the other hand, y-axis shows the Water Withdrawal per capita of any nation. This value can only be positive, but it’s necessary to specify that there is a sort of implicit negative aspect: by averaging the sum of extracted water in all the World and the World population is possible to determine a “fair” value of water per capita, which is about 600 m3 per year.

This value is refered to the concept of Virtual water trade, which points to a sort of global balance in the possession and use of freshwater.

In this way it’s clear that the countries placed above the “fairness” line have a quantity of water higher than the “necessary” and so they should theoretically export to ensure this balance; below the line of “fairness” are those nations that should import virtual water.

This visualization gives us the opportunity to have an overview, because the four quadrants in which the graph is divided allow to organize the world states in four categories: 1. states in which the Water Withdrawal per capita exceeds the mondial average that actually export virtual water 2. states in which the Water Withdrawal per capita exceeds the mondial average that actually import virtual water 3. states in which the Water Withdrawal per capita is under the mondial average that actually export virtual water 4. states in which the Water Withdrawal per capita is under the mondial average that actually import virtual water Still referring to the concept of global balance, the countries belonging to quadrants 1 and 3 behave “properly”, while those in quadrants 2 and 4 behave “incorrectly.”

Furtheremore, we found important to visualize each states with circles of different dimensions, according to the relative population. The relevance of each state depends infact on its own population.

In addition, we used five different colour fields to visualize the elements of the different continents.

These graphical choices add extra meanings to the immediate reading of the graph and provides additional food for thought.

COMMENTS

From a first reading of the graph you can see that the various States are arranged in all the four quadrants: the global behavior is clearly vastly differenciated. A lot of States have a net export of virtual water close to zero; that means that many countries do not exploit the theoretical potential of alternative water. Moreover, there are “limit cases� on both sides, as for positive instance the United States that have a large quantity of water resources and export a large amount of virtual water, or negative such as Belgium, which despite having a higher-than-avarage value of water extracted, still imports virtual water. Throughout the continents division, it’s possible to notice that the African nations, except for few cases, are all located very close to zero on the export (x-axis) and far below the world avarage on the y-axys. European nations in the graph show how States that are geographically close and have similar natural resources can approach the issue in a diametrically opposed way. On the other hand, Asian States are widely distributed on the chart even embodying two of the borderline cases of import and export of virtual water (respectively, Sri Lanka and Thailand).

As you can see, the graph returns an immediate view of the overall attitude of nations regarding the virtual water trade, but at the same time allows a detailed analysis of individual States.

This first visualization was a keypoint for the project team for an initial analysis and contextualization of the virtual water trade: the issue itself is very complex and a first general overview of today global situation was necessary before moving to the setting of the protocol.

2.2. SOURCES OF INFORMATION tools

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Google Harvester Issue Geographer IP Location Finder

GOOGLE.COM

To start our protocol we began with the research of “Virtual water trade” on Google.com, modifying the settings as follows: ›› any type of active filter ›› Google Instant inactive ›› emergence of the first 100 pages found.

HARVESTER

We copied and pasted the results source page in the analysis window of Harvester and we placed the suitable settings to obtain the specific list of the first 100 pages appeared on Google.com.

Then we manually analyzed them, one by one, in order to reject all blogs and booksellers’ sites and to keep away PDFs to reserve them a different treatment.

revision

But in this way, among the first 100 starting pages we only saved 37, very few for a work study on large scale; so we made a step back on Google. com to analyze with Harvester 100 more pages after the ones which were already analyzed.

We followed the same process of skimming to obtain 65 final results, divided into 50 pages and 15 scientific papers in PDF format: these are the first major results, worldwide relevant, concerning the concept of Virtual water trade.

GEOGRAPHER

At this point we focused our work on geolocation of 65 pages found hosts, using Issue Geographer [Fig.4], an instrument of geographic display/ mapping.

Since the software was not able to identify the place of origin of all the sites, we used a second tool, IPLocationFinder: by it we recovered all the missing hosts and then we integrated them in the Geographer.

IP LOCATION FINDER

In this way we found out which state published on the web the information we analyzed about our theme, using digital methods and our attention.

Fig. 4

Issue Geographer: final result of web pages host.

visualizing

To complete the research work of this first part, we considered it necessary to create intermediate visualization in order to match the data obtained

by Geographer and data collected by us. To better understand, it is needed to bear in mind that not always the primary source of information production geographically coincides with the point from which information is conveyed and released.

PDF - provenienza e hostthishost PDF - provenienza Once verified that for web pages e speech was redundant (all hosts

corresponded to those who created the page), we decided to visualize only scientific papers.

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Africa Africa Africa America U.S.A. America Asia Asia Asia Oceania Oceania Oceania Europa Europa Europe

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For this last stage we passed through several steps to finally reach a very simple visualization, that uses 3 levels of reading [Fig.5]: ›› color and size of each state: the first is associated with its own continent ›› and the second is proportional to the number of input/output links ›› location of states in the display space that refers to the political geography and reinforces the separation of continents ›› connecting lines that, for different aspects, stress at a glance if the link between paper and host is intracontinental or intercontinental.

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Australia Fig. 5

The final visualization.

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2.3 DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES tools ››

Fineo

In order to understand more deeply the essence of the information produced by the nations previously identified, we decided to investigate also the type of information; we found it by manual analysis of the 50 selected pages. At this juncture we didn’t consider the 15 papers, because we decided to consider them as a different category, strictly scientific. typologies

The categories identified were 6, based fundamentally on choices of common sense and consistency with the nature of the site: ›› sites of organizations, identified by both its domain .org and the contents of About ›› government sites, defined more by the domain .gov ›› information sites, for example those owned by newspapers ›› sites of scientific research, of different value respect the papers ›› social-media sites and blog we considered sufficiently complete and in which the issue is debated broadly ›› commercial sites

FINEO

The purpose of this analysis is to correlate states producing information with the type of information they propose: at first the comparison was possible thanks to Fineo [Fig.6].

This visualization allowed us to identify immediately which countries promote composite knowledge and which focus the information mainly on one or just few aspects; at the same time, so clearly, emerges that some typologies are more shared than others and in a specific way how the sites of organizations are undoubtedly the most part of the overall communication about Virtual water trade.

Fig. 6

Example of Fineo’s visualization about UK-types and Organization web sites-States.

The path we followed to visualized in this second part was more complex than in the first, because we wanted to show the production of information about virtual water trade, highlighting the quantity, the typologies and the countries that actually produce information. Then the visual form would keep in evidence both qualitative and quantitative analysis.

The display path of this second part was characterized by several graphic and conceptual steps.

A first attempt was to locate on the map the states that take care about our subject, using some histograms to show how many pages were produced by each state, which typology these pages belong to and what percentage they represent respect the whole information produced by that country [Fig.7].

The limit of this visualization was the ineffective visual form of the large continental disparities: the physical dimensions of the nations on the map didn’t reflect the “relevance” of nations as information producers, so it appeared to be an obstacle for communicative immediacy. For this reason we decided to continue the visual research through a process without physical maps.

In the second attempt we tried to highlight the individual contribution of each continent respect the diffusion of knowledge about virtual water trade, arranging them in space according to the political geography, but scaling them according to the principle of relevance [Fig.8].

For each continent, the actual number of hosts and the division in types were then explicitated by a donut chart: solved the display problem of continental diversity, this representation lacked of precision and comparability of different areas.

Furthermore, it was difficult to find a compromise between a correct calculation of land area and an effective visual form that emphasized the diversity.

At the same time, this visualization was also created to represent the question “paper production vs. online diffusion”: the resulting output was not effective enough for readers.

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First attempt: states-types.

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Second attempt: ratio among continents.

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Thinking through the original aim of this second part of the protocol, we focused on the key concepts to visualize: the amount of information divided by type and by origin and an immediate comparison of data.

The last visualization started from a simple graph [Fig.9], that shows how the production of information is distributed in the world. This rapresentation evolved into a specific table [Fig.10] introduced by an overview pie chart of the hosts amount of the final corpus divided by type.

The most part of the visualization consists instead of a treemap that shows all analyzed hosts divided by continent: the area of each continent is then divided chromatically according to the type of host and each type is, in turn, broken down by specific country of diffusion. The production of information for individual states is then “reconstructed” on a side with other smaller treemaps.

This board allows a consultation of the matter, starting from different perspectives of investigation: the observer can analyze the situation on global, continental or national scale, or starting from types.

Europe North America Asia Oceania Africa

Fig. 9

Pie charts about the world info’s production.

comments

From observation of hosts we can see how the scientific papers and the websites of scientific research are the two most representative categories of the corpus (if summed they represents almost 50% of whole analyzed information). Europe is characterized as the geographic area with the biggest production of information (32 of 65 results), followed by North America (23), and then, with great detachment Asia (5), Oceania (3) and Africa (2).

From a second analysis Europe and North America are characterized by production of different types of information while Asia, Oceania and Africa, despite producing a limited amount of information, are more homogeneous in their production.

This means that the information production is highly “localized” and that this monopoly also corresponds to a greater diversity of information.

Focusing on reading of different typologies in different continents, several interesting observations can be drawn. For example, we can observe that: - Europe holds the record for the production of scientific papers (10), followed by Asia which, though it has a limited production of information, counts 3 papers; - North America can boast a good deal of information produced which also belong to types not present in Europe, but that it doesn’t stand out for scientific papers etc..

Then is also interesting the analysis of the different states that produce information: in Europe there are many countries that are involved in this matter, while in USA the whole phenomenon is reduced to only two states (United States and Canada). Until the extreme condition of Oceania and Africa, represented by a single state (respectively Australia and South Africa). So, notwithstanding the issue of virtual water trade potentially involves every country in the world, there are very few nations that contribute to the spread of this concept.

2.4. LINKED PAGES TOOLS ›› ››

Craw List Gephy

At this point, to frame information in a more detailed way, we asked ourselves who was connected to the main pages that produce information.

Our aim was, beginning from the 50 pages of the starting corpus, finding pages linked to these and defining the typology of these, to make a comparison between type of the first pages and type of the linked pages. In this way we aimed to find out if there were or not connections in a typological way.

CRAW LIST

Through Craw List we created a list of all pages linked to the starting corpus.

We thus obtained a list of 3365 pages related to the starting 50. The list was then reduced by removing the pages that were part of the sites of departure until we obtained 904 pages: a number however too high in order to define the type of each page, as we set out.

GEPHY

Using Gephi, a visual representation of the list provided by the Crawl was created [Fig.11].

Because of the impossibility of defining the type of the linked page, this representation, altought it shows the network of relationships, was not meaningful and so it was omitted in the final analysis.

Fig. 11 Gephy visualization.

2.5. THE REAL ACTORS tools

At this level of research it became interesting to delv into the work, trying to understeand if actually the states that produce information are or not the only ones massively involved in the virtual water trade.

During our first screening from which we obtained the corpus, we selected also 15 of the first scientific papers in PDF format found online for two reasons: ›› for the aim of our work the research department is the most interesting and, being scientific papers all of this type, we could not neglect them ›› the most of the actual first results found with Google.com were scientific paper, therefore, to not ignore this data, we took them to perform the semantic analysis

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The software, unfortunately, extracted only few states and didn’t calculated correctly the number of times they appeared; not being able to determine the reasons, we decided to use another counter software, Word Counter for Macintosh.

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WORD COUNTer

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To retrieve this data we used at first Alchemy API, in order to identify both in the 50 page and in the 15 PDF all the states named and the numbers of mentiones for each one.

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ALCHEMY API

This visualization helped us through the path of work. In the first image we can see only which states cites which other [Fig.12], in the second one instead we can see which continent cites which other continent [Fig.13].

In this first approach, we cared only about Europe and Asia, respectively represented in blue and red, showing at a glance with this “radar” system as some parts of the world talk a lot about themselves, while others deal widely also foreign cases.

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Among the most successful, the one proposed here (an high view of the globe) is interesting because it highlights the areas of dissemination of papers, focusing on which continents speak only about themselves and which ones speak also about others.

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Fig. 12 Who cites who?

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Even at this juncture we tried several representations before reaching the final one that was realized, indirectly by Fineo, only in the final interactive visualization.

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Fig. 13 Which continents speaks about others?

2.6. INTEREST In order to delve into the interest, which emerges from the web, of a nation about the water trade, we asked ourselves one last question, which, as mentioned in the introduction of the protocol (chapter 2), we could not solve.

Starting with the research of “virtual water trade” in Google of the different countries that we have selected, we hypothesized two ways to answer the question: 1. doing a semantic analysis, using tags to pages, and so discovering the interest of that state for the issue 2. proceeding with the observation of the positioning of the page in Google.**, comparing it with the position that the same page had in Google.com We had to discard the first hypothesis for technical reasons: to perform the semantic analysis we should have used Alchemy API, but it reads only a limited number of languages . Since this part of our investigation was based on research in many languages, we had to renounce to it.

Moreover, later we realized that we had another problem: for some countries the translation of “virtual water trade” is not literal and, being a relatively new and few discussed concept, we had no way to get accurate translations; for others, however, the research could be performed in both native language and in English (often 2nd language), risking to generate too many variables in our path.

The second hypothesis, instead, would be easily prosecuted with a manual comparison analysis if we had not had time limits.

3. Ultimate visualization tools

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Fineo Scatter plot

The last visualization represent the entire anlysis process done on scientific papers, defined as the most useful and relevant tools for the controversy we investigated.

The aim of it is multiple: showing the “relevance” of the papers analyzed, representing which are the states potentially most involved in the issue of virtual water trade (based on the number of citations in the papers) and trying to frame the perspective in which each paper speaks about the issue.

The first attempt of visualization focused on representing how the countries, as producers of scientific papers, “speak” about other ones.

We wished to investigate if mentioned countries change dramatically with the variation of the countries that produce information. The visualization use an azimuthal perspective of the world focused on continent that produces the papers with links to the countries mentioned (to a greater number of citations corresponds a diameter of the highlighting ares wider). The rapresentation responded to the partial goal previously setted, but because of the complexity and “completeness” of the analysis we performed, it was necessary to make a further visualization effort to satisfy the multitude of purposes identified.

The ultimate visualization was designed to be interactive (available at link www.lorenzoberte.com/vwt) to allow the development of a dual level of interpretation: horizontal (comparison of data between different papers) and vertical (in three steps of analysis). In the navigation bar at the top there are the icons of the 15 papers that allow to highlight the

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P.Q. Hung M.M. Aldaya A. Garrido

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data of each document in comparison with the data related to the other pdf; while on the right there are three navigation buttons, which allow the vertical reading.

In the first step is given the scientific relevance of each paper, based on the number of citations of the author’s name in the other papers; in the second, highlighting the state of origin of the paper analized, we can see the importance of the nations mentioned in it; in the third, taking into account the “behavior” of the most often cited countries respect to virtual water trade, is generally possible to identify in what perspective is the issue addressed in the paper choosen. This last step allows to try to interpret the “interests” for the issue of various states producing the papers (information of a theme).

To better understand, let’s see in details the charts that make up the entire visualization.

The first step is an histogram that shows the number of citations of the name of each author in the other analyzed documents; this allows a contextualization of the paper importance within the debate on virtual water trade.

The second step consists of a Sankey that have as starting points the papers (with highlighted the state of origin) and as points of arrival the states mentioned within them. It’s important to bear in mind that the starting points (the visual line) of individual papers are equivalent one to each other and not proportionate according to the citation number of the states: in this case, infact, very full-bodied and with many-mentions papers would “diminish” the more synthetic ones.

It’s also necessary to specify that as “target” nations we selected the 15 most relevant among the most mentioned in the papers: for each document we selected the 20 most mentioned and then we continued by calculating the percentage relative to every mentioned nation; from the sum of these percentages we succeed in determining the most important States (the rest of the cited nations merged into the “rest of the world”).

Finally, the third step shows the relevance of most cited countries in each paper, thanks to a scatter plot similar to the one which we previously used. Depending on the relevance of each country in a particular paper we can go to outline the orientation of each paper about the theme of virtual water trade (citing only “virtuous” countries they point on a positive perspective of the topic, instead, mentioning many countries with different behaviors is possible to carry out a global analysis of the issue, etc).

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Netherlands (9)

Israel (5) China (4)

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NET VIRTUAL WATER EXPORT pro capita (106 m3/yr) -1,87

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Static scheme

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comments

This last visualization is an “overview” of the corpus of scientific papers selected by us. Using the navigation is possible to highlight links and differences between the various documents, giving evidence to some relevant aspects of the scientific debate on virtual water trade, hard to detect in other ways.

The first level of reading, the histogram, is a useful value of reference for orientation in the corpus of documents. By relying on it, we can easily identify those who may be called the leaders of the debate and therefore the most important documents in the dispute. In contrast, the documents, whose authors are few or even not mentioned, may be considered less influent in the global debate.

The second level of reading, the Sankey, provides a representation of which countries are most affected by the issue. Here emerge the Asian giants (India, China and Japan) and some among European countries, while do not appear, among the most cited, African or South American countries.

This glance helps to geographically locate the issue, leaving some questions opened such as the absence of African and South American countries, so tragically marked by the scarcity of water resources.

By comparing the flows of Sankey we can start to make a clear distinction between the scientific papers examinated. There are, infact, papers offering an overview of virtual water trade, also citing the vast majority of countries without leaving the least cited (represented by the “rest of the

World”) and, then, there are documents that offer a detailed analysis of the way in which individual countries act in terms of virtual water trade and the impact that these have on the balance in an international way. These papers are identifiable by the high percentage of citations dedicated to a single country.

It’s interesting to notice that the major contributions in terms of citations of the first three most often cited countries comes from this type of document. Although these papers are cited very few times in the body they contribute in a decisive way to determine which are the hot spots, or rather the nations by which the balance of an entire region in terms of virtual water trade depends.

The third and last step is an attempt of visualization of the perspective of each individual paper about the issue.

Placing the states cited by a papers on the scatter plot chart previously created, we can try to interpret what kind of attitude is the subject of analysis in the selected document. There are, infact, papers that deal with various types of approach to the problem, while there are some that focus on those behaviors that are more in line with the principle of virtual water trade. Others take in exam almost exclusively countries with abundant water resources, distinguishing those who successfully export part of this excess water and who import equally going against the very principle of virtual water trade as a solution of the global water crisis.

POSSIBle developments

To conclude the analysis of the scientific debate we thought about a possible development (the 4th visualization) useful to determine the existing connections between couples of States in Virtual water trade issue. To do that we imagined a reading of Sankey (the one we realized for the interactive visualization) starting from the bottom, to highlight how many times some countries are cited and from who. Examinating these two data set and making a comparison among different States we think it’s possible to determine the relations, starting from the assumption that if two States are cited a similar number of times in the same papers, we can try to hypothesize the existence of a relation between them.

To make an example we can take India and China [Fig.1]: they are both cited few times in papers which take a global perspective of the problem, but widely and deeply analyzed in more specific papers which consider them accordingly to their relevance in the international balance of the entire South-East Asian region.

Then there is a correlation between Egypt and France [Fig. 2], at least for the european papers in which the two States are often both present. The similarity between the flows originated by these two country are often taken as an example of a possible application of the idea of virtual water trade on the international level.

The last evident relation is the one between Jordan and Israel [Fig. 3], that reveal the existence of a minor sub-controversy, in which the object is the possibility that virtual water trade could solve the disputes about the control of the water resources.

In order to make this tool more efficient could be useful to enlarge both the corpus of documents taken in exam and the number of nations cited, so that it would highlight also other sides of the World, such as Africa and South America, that were excluded from the visualization for lack of space, but that could however obtain big benefit from the right application of the principle of virtual water trade.

4. Conclusions The controversy we analyzed required a preliminary process of analysis to understand the magnitude of the issue and the involved characters, and to establish a general framework that would allow the contextualization of such a complex phenomenon.

This phase was crucial for the understanding of the controversy and therefore it was important for us to develop a first visualization of sense regarding the totality of the theme that would introduce the readers to the protocol.

Thanks to the scatter plot chart we have provided the readers with an immediate tool of easy consuting to help them to navigate within the landscape of the theme.

The second major issue was to summed up graphically the reality of information about the virtual water trade on the web. Through a very schematic representation it was possible to give to the readers a view of the digital information about the topic, highlighting who’s speaking about virtual water trade and in which context (divided by type).

Then, having outlined the scientific paper as the type of more valuable and interesting information to analyze the issue, we focused on the graphic representation of sets of data, extrapolated from the papers and functional to the comprehension of the actual scientific debate (which countries are cited by who produce information, in which perspective they deal the theme, etc...). All this allowed the creation of a resumptive interactive visualization of a great number of aspects, very complex but functional to the construction of a complete sight.

The development of the protocol led us to results that we judge very satisfying, because the designed visualizations don’t limit themselves to the representation of pre-existent or previously obteined data sets, but give to the readers a great number of additional input of thought.

Thanks to the scatter plot is possible to have an overview, but also have resumptive sights divided by continents, population, etc. useful to obtain several idea of anlysis.

Then, thanks to treemap it was possible to develop a presentation about who produce information (not end in itself), but that allows several reading levels in order to make further comparisons depending from the analysis depth.

Last, but not least, the ultimate visualization permitted us to investigate a really complex reality, obtaining with it a representation of guided fruition that, thanks to the comparison among papers, provides additional food for thought deriving from the analysis of the papers behaviour.

Lab. Sintesi Finale | A.A. 2011/2012 Politecnico di Milano | Facoltà del Design Group: Freshwater 02 Silvia Acerbi, Paola Berardelli, Lorenzo Bertè, Samantha Pietrovito, Irene Zocco.