Optional: talk to some journalists.
What tasks would this help with?
- Keeping an eye on...
- ... parliaments,
- ... procurement,
- ... grants,
- ... air traffic,
- ... scientific research publications,
- ... patent applications,
- ... crime and punishment,
- ... obituaries,
- ... gas prices,
- ... movie release dates,
- ... the sky,
- ... the volcano,
- ... lobbyists signing up to a register,
- ... company statements coming out,
- ... changes in company ownership,
- ... local elections,
- ... food prices, commodity prices, harvests.
Explain it to me, I'm a normal person: I want to be able to reduce the amount of manual labour in keeping track of developments in different areas of expertise. I don't want to look at that PDF every week. I don't want to waste hours in a week checking this data against that data.
Explain it to me, I'm a developer: You can create a feed service and push messages to the service. Messages have a metadata envelope and the actual data contained within a record of the data source that you're providing.
You can also write processing stages, such as geo-coders, company register lookups, value normalisation or named entity extraction.
Even more, you can code event handlers which get triggered by matching filters and then take some action, such as notifying a user via email, a text message or by sending an automated killer drone which then eradicates a medium-sized village. We're hoping for good data quality on the last one.
- datawi.re is a streaming service for monitoring misc data feeds.
- datawi.re is just another thing you connect your scrapers to, allows for quick and simple submission of a data frame.
- datawi.re has a twitter-like UI. each service defines a template with which a data frame is rendered.
- instead of following a user or a hashtag, you follow search terms by adding them to one of your four watchlists.