= Blueprint for extending the message parsing framework =
[[TOC]]


The inbound message parsing framework was developed during GSoC 2012. See the [wiki:BluePrint/Messaging/Parsing 2012 GSoC message parser project].


* The framework is highly extensible and the parsing workflows are customisable per deployment in the templates. A nice example of this is the NLTK synonym matching filter developed during the H4D2 hackathon.(See [https://github.com/flavour/eden/blob/master/private/templates/default/parser.py#L67 here]).


* The system supports multiple communication channels i.e Emails, SMS and Twitter.But, certainly a number of incoming feeds (so not just SMS/Tweets, but also RSS feeds, etc.) can be integrated with the system.So, plugging in the RSS feeds would be one useful step. 


* Things that we want to extract and are essential requirements for the framework are discussed below.

== Input Source Improvements ==

=== Reliability/trustworthiness of the message sources/senders ===

                  * Currently, this is done manually through the CRUD interface with the msg_sender data model. 
             
                  * A 'river' of messages are processed with starring of senders & adding of keywords on the fly so that the system gradually becomes more automated through the process.

                  * We could as well pre-populate the keywords database with the most frequently used keywords (esp. in incident reporting) and the rest can be added on the fly.

      
== Parser Improvements ==

=== Actionability ===

                  * Is this something that we can actually do something with?
                  * Its important to manage the content coming from various message sources and separate the ones that are actionable and contains useful information from the rest of them.
      

=== Location ===
                  * Another important requirement is to improve the ability to extract location data out of unstructured text and make sense of ambigous locations.

                  * An OpenGeoSMS parser already exists in the default parser template(also available as an API within s3msg.py) which is able to parse lat-lon information of the location from OpenGeoSMS formatted messages. But , it would be great if it could be linked with the database (look the location up from the database).

== UI Improvements ==

                  * Implementing a UI which prioritises message parsing for starred senders is a useful requirement.
                  * The user should be able to *star* senders and *mark* keywords through the UI.

== Use Cases ==

=== Parsing bounced messages ===

                  * This is very important for IFRC Africa who send out bulk emails to their volunteer base from Eden & want to know which mails are
                   mis-typed / users moved / etc.
                 
=== Situational Awareness Dashboard ===

                  * Trying to present a single,simplified view for many disparate information sources including RSS feeds.