
EventRegistry – Real-time, annotated feed of world news - pbadenski
http://eventregistry.org/
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hak8or
The pricing is contact us levels, so right off the bat probably more than
three quarters of readers brushed this off.

I don't see any free public API like twitters mini firehose (10% of traffic
for free).

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Spivak
Given their client base, it seems they don't really care about attracting
small players.

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GregorLeban
We are happy to accommodate big as well as small players, as well as
collaborate with others on joined projects.

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lettergram
My startup is actually a similar product, although we are approaching it in a
very different way:

[https://projectpiglet.com/](https://projectpiglet.com/)

We are also specifically targeting investing, as opposed to a more broad
market (for now).

Piglet, tracks top news stories, identifies how domain experts feel about said
news stories (as well as general topics), and provides trend, sentiment, and
net promoter tracking. We just launched a very rough MVP a few days ago.

If you're interested, on the first of every month, we send a survey. If
completed, you will receive the next month free of charge. It's free as long
as you keep providing feedback.

~~~
antisthenes
All of the investment is handled by the user, right?

You only handle the news?

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lettergram
Yup, only handle news, sentiment, and trends on subject matter.

It's basically an engine bubble up only the most relevant news. Then get
experts opinions on said topics / news.

We are also very close to releasing our financial advisor, based on top of the
data. Currently, it's written in python, so we need to make it accessible via
the website.

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jawrainey
Really great idea, thanks for sharing! I do wonder, is this really annotated
feeds?

For me, this is machine-curated feeds rather than a form of annotation given
no additional information (besides meta-data scrapped and categorised) is
displayed. Not quite as catchy, but annotations make me (at least) think of
something else.

Note: am passionated about designing to support annotations on media directly.

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lrei
Afaik there is no meta data scrapped (technically I think some HTML meta tags
are scrapped but not sure if used).

There is machine-learning in the annotations - categories rely on a (cross
lingual) text classifier, entities rely on matching to Wikipedia articles,
maybe a bunch of small other things to - I don't know all the details - there
are some papers published about it.

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oceanbreeze83
interested in knowing about these papers. can you point me to some?

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pbadenski
A query to Google Scholar and quick skimming through the papers yields this as
interesting start:

Event Registry – Learning About World Events From News
[http://wwwconference.org/proceedings/www2014/companion/p107....](http://wwwconference.org/proceedings/www2014/companion/p107.pdf)

Using news articles for real-time cross-lingual event detection and filtering
[http://ai2-s2-pdfs.s3.amazonaws.com/f917/c0cff24fed1af45f94c...](http://ai2-s2-pdfs.s3.amazonaws.com/f917/c0cff24fed1af45f94c53b74ca0229874966.pdf)

~~~
lrei
Correct. Main author of the project is Gregor Leban:

[https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=5pAxBWsAAAAJ&hl=...](https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=5pAxBWsAAAAJ&hl=en)

The original crawler (newsfeed.ijs.si) paper is from

Trampus, Mitja and Novak, Blaz: The Internals Of An Aggregated Web News Feed.
Proceedings of 15th Multiconference on Information Society 2012 (IS-2012).

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md224
It would be cool if they provided a public WebSocket that anyone could use to
consume events.

Related: it would be cool if there was a directory of public WebSockets
offering a variety of real-time data streams.

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jswny
I'm not too familiar with WebSockets. How trivial would it be processing power
wise to provide this service? How trivial would it be for a large news
organization like BBC to do something like this?

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lrei
trivial processing power but news organizations tend to want traffic on their
websites where you can see ads and click on them and other content. Not sure
for how long they will even support RSS let alone make an effort to support
websockets. They begrudgingly push stuff into social media only because it
significantly pushes traffic to their sites.

~~~
OJFord
> Not sure for how long they will even support RSS

Many don't. Examples I tried recently include:

The Telegraph (dead link from [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/follow-
us/](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/follow-us/) and feeds available for
_some_ sections at
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/{section}/rss.xml](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/{section}/rss.xml)
\- not e.g. politics)

The Times had links available with comically out of date (years) feeds - I
can't find the page now, so maybe they did respond to my tweet in a way...
although not quite I'd hoped for if so!

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magnetic
How does figure out the location? Somehow it thinks that the Champs-Elysées is
in Brasilia, Brazil?
[http://eventregistry.org/event/eng-3221578?tab=articles&arti...](http://eventregistry.org/event/eng-3221578?tab=articles&articlesSortBy=cosSim)

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megamindbrian
What if we added bill and statute changes at every municipal, could we measure
if cities are more "business" oriented as opposed to "humane" oriented?

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brad0
> See the future

I'm curious to see this in action but it seems like I have to pay. Any idea
what they could be doing?

Feeding tags and dates into a machine learning model to predict future events?

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GregorLeban
No, you don't have to pay. Here is for example a list of known events that
will happen in the next month:
[http://eventregistry.org/searchEvents?query=%7B%22dateStart%...](http://eventregistry.org/searchEvents?query=%7B%22dateStart%22:%222017-06-20%22,%22dateEnd%22:%222017-07-20%22,%22preferredLang%22:%22eng%22%7D&tab=events&eventsSortBy=rel)

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lrei
Hi - I've used this API several times. Ask me anything (though there have been
been changes since I last used it)

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pbadenski
Neat!

\- What did you use it for?

\- What where the alternatives you considered?

\- What was your overall experience? (eg. data quality or API ease of use)

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lrei
I used it only for research (1 for media bias analysis related to the refugee
crisis and 1 at the intersection of social/media and economy).

I know the people who started EventRegistry (same department/institute as me)
so I didn't care so much about finding alternatives (I.e I got free access, I
think most research users do have free access)

Data quality was mostly ok but some artifacts of the article content
extraction (e.g. Something like readability) were present like bits of social
media share buttons. Also some updated articles were not marked as updates but
rather as new articles (after some threshold of changes).

The API has been improved since I last used it - but I found it a bit
unintuitive and complicated at the time (almost a year ago). From my
understanding it is a bit engineered in order to prevent users from
accidentally doing expensive queries or pulling in too much data. kind of
makes it harder to use. But still simple - you get up and running Withings
minutes and just refine your queries as you go. API limits were generous and
you could always resume work after the limit reset (I was getting historical
data rather than following the stream)

