What is An Association?
Associations can be "something that happens or is regarded as happening; an occurrence, especially one of some importance", "the outcome, issue, or result of anything", or "something that occurs in a certain place during a particular interval of time" (Definitions found here: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/event). Within Infinit.e events are typically a combination of entities assembled in the form of Noun - Verb - Noun, e.g. "a car crashed into a building", "the plane flew to San Diego". In addition to the Noun - Verb - Noun form events can include geographic information (i.e., where an event happened) as well as a start and/or end time for an event. The following section describes how to specify the extraction of events from a data source using the Structured Analysis Harvester.
Basic Association Specification
The following code demonstrates how to specify a basic association (Note: The sample event specification and sample event output below is extracted from a MySql Database Source the full content of which can be viewed here.):
...
- event_type
"Event", "Fact", "Summary"
The "assoc_type" field sub-categorizes the "event" object into one of three types, "Event", "Fact", or "Summary". Examples provided below should make the distinction clearer, but it can be simply described as follows:- "Event": link multiple entities (via "entity1_index", "entity2_index", "geo_index") and represent a transient activity (eg travel)
- "Fact": link multiple entities like "Events" but represent (transient or permanent) relationships (eg being president)
- "Summary": generally link 1 entity to a free text (eg a quotation: "Obama says...").
Specifying Additive Events
Additive events
Specifying Multiplicative Associations
Multiplicative association are associations that are created by "multiplying" a combination of entities, locations, and times together to determine the number of associations to extract from the source data. For example, in the following sample document describing a terrorist attack one terrorist (perpetrator) attacked two different types of victims (police officers and military personnel) in Sri Lanka. The association specification uses the multiplicative format to create events using the following math to determine the total number of associations: Entity1 (PersonPerpetrator) X Entity2 (VictimType) X Geo_index (Location) = Total Number of Associations.
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{
//...
"associations" : [
{
"entity1" : "secular/political/anarchist from sri lanka",
"entity1_index" : "secular/political/anarchist from sri lanka/personperpetrator",
"verb" : "attacked",
"verb_category" : "assault/attack",
"entity2" : "targeted, police, adult from sri lanka",
"entity2_index" : "targeted, police, adult from sri lanka/victimtype",
"time_start" : "09/07/2005",
"geotag" : {
"lat" : "7.7166667",
"lon" : "81.7"
},
"geo_index" : "batticaloa,north eastern province,sri lanka/location",
"assoc_type" : "Event"
},
{
"entity1" : "secular/political/anarchist from sri lanka",
"entity1_index" : "secular/political/anarchist from sri lanka/personperpetrator",
"verb" : "attacked",
"verb_category" : "assault/attack",
"entity2" : "targeted, military, adult, combatant from sri lanka",
"entity2_index" : "targeted, military, adult, combatant from sri lanka/victimtype",
"time_start" : "09/07/2005",
"geotag" : {
"lat" : "7.7166667",
"lon" : "81.7"
},
"geo_index" : "batticaloa,north eastern province,sri lanka/location",
"assoc_type" : "Event"
}
],
//...
}
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