wiki:BluePrint/Messaging/ExtendingParsing

Version 12 (modified by Ashwyn, 12 years ago) ( diff )

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Blueprint for extending the message parsing framework

The inbound message parsing framework was developed during GSoC 2012. See the 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 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.
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