SwiftRiver: Open Source Pushes into the Intel Space

September 13, 2010

If you are one of the social netizens, you know it isn’t easy to keep track of, manage, and organize the hundreds of Twitter streams, Facebook updates, blog posts, RSS feeds, or SMS that you keep getting. Do not feel helpless as SwiftRiver comes to your aid, which is a free open source intelligence-gathering platform for managing real-time streams of data streams. This unique platform consists of a number of unique products and technologies, and its goal is to aggregate the information from multiple media channels, and add context related to it, using semantic analysis.

SwiftRiver can also be used as a search tool, for email filtering, to monitor numerous blogs, and verify real-time data from various channels. It offers, “Several advanced tools (social graph mining, natural language processing, locations servers, and twitter analytics) for free use via the open API platform Swift Web Services.” According to the parent site Swiftly.org, “This free tool is especially for organizations who need to sort their data by authority and accuracy, as opposed to popularity.” SwiftRiver has the ability to act quickly on massive amounts of data, a feat critical for emergency response groups, election monitors, media, and others.

There are multiple Swift Rivers. You want the one at http://swift.ushahidi.com or http://swiftly.org/.

Ushahidi, the company behind this initiative claims, “The SwiftRiver platform offers organizations an easy way to combine natural language/artificial intelligence process, data-mining for SMS and Twitter, and verification algorithms for different sources of information.” Elaborating further it states, “SwiftRiver is unique in that there is no singular ‘SwiftRiver’ application. Rather, there are many, that combine plug-ins, APIs, and themes in different ways that are optimized for workflows.”

Presently SwiftRiver uses the Sweeper App, the Kohana MVC UI, the distributed reputation system RiverID, and SwiftWebServices (SWS) as the API platform. The beauty here is that SwiftRiver is just the core, and it can have any UI, App, or API. It also has an intuitive and customizable dashboard, and the “users of WordPress and Drupal can add features like auto-tagging and more using Swift Web Services.” While you may download SwiftRiver and run it on your web server, SWS is a hosted cloud service, and does not need to be downloaded and installed.

Harleena Singh, September 13, 2010

Freebie

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Business intelligence, Enterprise, News, Open source, Technology, Text analytics, Text processing

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.