RSS Feed

A common Manager task is to process an RSS feed and configure the text and feature extractors for desired results.

Another way to quickly create an RSS source is to use the Google Chrome plugin. For more information, see section Chrome Source Extension.

Creating a New RSS Source

To create a source RSS Feed using the Source Manager.

1. Navigate to the Source Manager.

2. Select Source Editor from the menu.

3. Click the ‘New Source’ button at the top right of the screen.

4. Under the Source Template drop-down on the left side: select ‘RSS Source Template’ and click ‘Select’

5. Under the New Source template on the right side:

Enter a Title (i.e. NY Times Front Page) and Description (i.e. NY Times RSS)
Select a Community for your source (i.e. General News)
Select ‘Save Source’

6. When saved, the source template reloads with:

Unique ‘Share ID’ for your source
Title, Description, and Community ID entered in Step 5 are added to the corresponding fields in the JSON

7. Enter tags directly into the field provided by the GUI.

Note: No comma after the last tag, see below
i.e. "tags": ["NY Times", “Front Page”, “RSS”],

TODO: determine how to get "New York Times" added as a tag

8. Replace the template URL in the "url": field with the .rss or .xml URL for the desired RSS feed, followed by a comma after the quotation

Testing the Source

Once you have correctly configured the URL, you can test the source

To test the source

Click on Test Source

If the source has been correctly configured, the platform will return newly generated documents in a pop-up window.

Editing the Source

You will likely want to edit the source to tailor the text extraction and feature extraction settings. Source editing can be performed by using either the JSON editor, or Source Builder.*

*Enterprise edition only.

For more information concerning text extraction and feature extraction, see section Source Pipeline Elements.

It is assumed you have obtained an OpenCalais or AlchemyAPI key and configured the platform properties file. If not do that first.

Using Source Builder to Edit the Source

Source Builder provides an intuitive user interface to perform editing of sources. You can use Source Builder to change the Text Extraction and Feature Extraction settings.

To edit the extraction settings

From the Source editor, click on SRC UI. The Source Builder is displayed
Use "Source View" and "Form View" to change the enginename using the dropdown, as indicated in the screenshot below.

In this example, Automated Text Extraction has been set to alchemyapi, and Automated Entities has been set to opencalais.

For more information concerning text extraction and feature extraction, see section Source Pipeline Elements.

Re-testing

You need to save the source and re-test, in order to confirm that your changes had the desired effect. In our example, the platform returns associations, as per the following JSON example.

{
    "associations": [
        {
            "assoc_type": "Summary",
            "entity1": "direct contact",
            "entity2": "Ebola",
            "entity2_index": "ebola/medicalcondition",
            "verb": "spread",
            "verb_category": "generic relations"
        },
        {
            "assoc_type": "Summary",
            "entity2": "Thomas R. Frieden",
            "entity2_index": "thomas r. frieden/person",
            "verb": "screen",
            "verb_category": "generic relations"
        },
        {
            "assoc_type": "Fact",
            "entity1": "Thomas R. Frieden",
            "entity1_index": "thomas r. frieden/person",
            "entity2": "CNN",
            "entity2_index": "cnn international/company",
            "verb": "tell",
            "verb_category": "generic relations"
        },
        {
            "assoc_type": "Fact",
            "entity1": "Michael S. Rawlings",
            "entity1_index": "michael s. rawlings/person",
            "entity2": "Mayor",
            "entity2_index": "mayor/position",
            "verb": "current",
            "verb_category": "career"
        },
        {
            "assoc_type": "Summary",
            "entity1": "Thomas R. Frieden",
            "entity1_index": "thomas r. frieden/person",
            "entity2": "whether the patient is an american citizen",
            "verb_category": "quotation"
        },
        {
            "assoc_type": "Summary",
            "entity1": "Thomas R. Frieden",
            "entity1_index": "thomas r. frieden/person",
            "verb": "announced",
            "verb_category": "person communication"
        },

Publishing the Source

Once you are satisfied with the results, you can publish the source.

To publish the source

Ensure that you save the source since your last modifications.
Click on Publish Source. The source is published and progress is available from Source Monitor.

In this section:

Related Documentation:

Visualization Widgets User Guide

Learn how to gain insights from your sources once they have been added to the platform.

Related Developer Documentation:

Source Pipeline Documentation