wiki:BluePrint/SocialMedia/GHC2013SocialMediaHITProcessing

Version 24 (modified by Pat Tressel, 11 years ago) ( diff )

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Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
    1. Background
  2. Project breakdown
    1. Set up incoming messages
    2. Fill in required "new module" boilerplate
    3. Add a database table for message processing tasks
    4. Track which messages have been processed
    5. Add a controller function to generate task pages for workers
    6. Add a view that presents a task to the worker and submits their work
    7. Generate a list of categories from the database

Introduction

  • Receive tweets and / or SMS messages from the public.
  • Dispatch these to online workers to classify and geocode.
  • Display on a map.

Background

During the Haiti earthquake of Jan 2010, people trapped in buildings sent SMS messages to a designated shortcode. These were classified, translated, and geocoded by online workers using ​Amazon's Mechanical Turk, then provided to emergency managers.

During the Kenya 2013 general election, citizens and trained election monitors reported election-related incidents via SMS and twitter. These were automatically entered into a map database, then vetted by online workers to remove spam and contact the sender for clarification, before making the information public. See: ​https://uchaguzi.co.ke/

During a Random Hacks of Kindness hackathon in 2010, a variant of this project was implemented using a Sahana Eden as the back end and a custom web page (not automatically generated by Eden) as the front end. This was designed as a training game -- workers got "experience points" and were awarded badges. See: ​http://gwob.org/101010-hackathon-winners/

Project breakdown

This project is intended to be easy to subdivide into tasks that can be worked on somewhat independently and in parallel, given the choice of a few naming conventions for new database tables and fields.

In order to keep our work together, and distinct from other work, we'll add a new module. This is the first step in added "human intelligence task" processing, in which results are verified by sending the same task to multiple workers, and comparing the results. So let's call our new module "hit". That means the controller file will be: 

eden/controllers/hit.py

The model will be: 

eden/modules/s3db/hit.py

The view pages will be in the directory: 

eden/view/hit

Everyone may find it useful to refer to:

We'll deal with some data outside the new module, such as:

Received messages are stored in the "message log" table, msg_message.
​https://github.com/flavour/eden/blob/master/modules/s3db/msg.py#L93

(This is a special kind of table called (in Eden terminology) a "superentity". This is like a superclass but for database tables. Records in multiple specialized tables have "parent" records in a shared superentity table, so other tables can refer to any of the specialized tables without needing a foreign key field for every one, by instead linking to the superentity record. References to ordinary non-superentity tables are simpler.)

Workers will sign up for accounts on an Eden site. When they sign up, they will have a record in the auth_user table and a record in the pr_person table for profile information. Because there are other things besides people that have addresses and such, there is a superentity for person-like types. But when we know we're referring to an actual person, we refer to their record in pr_person.

Set up incoming messages

Read the information on how messages are received by Eden from Twitter or SMS, and get test messages into an Eden instance.

Relevant documentation:

User interface: ​http://demo.eden.sahanafoundation.org/eden/msg/

Fill in required "new module" boilerplate

Look at the lesson on "making a new module" in the Eden book:
​http://booki.flossmanuals.net/sahana-eden/_draft/_v/1.0/building-a-new-application/

That puts the model file in the eden/models directory, but that is just to avoid complication. Models in eden/models are loaded on every http request, whether they're needed or not. Most Eden models are in eden/modules/s3db, and are only loaded by http requests that need them. Since our message processing won't be used by most types of requests, we want it in eden/modules/s3db.

Add the new module to the list of enabled modules. This is normally specified in a "template" that has the customizations for a particular site. Here, we will "cheat" and just add the new module to our configuration file eden/models/000_config.py. Get the default module list from eden/private/templates/default/config.py i.e.
​http://booki.flossmanuals.net/sahana-eden/_draft/_v/1.0/building-a-new-application/
Copy it to models/000_config.py and add an entry for the hit module.

Add a database table for message processing tasks

We want to add a table that holds the data entered by one worker for one message. The table will need fields for:

Why do we want a separate table? Why not just add a category and location to the msg_message table? Eventually, we want to do "human intelligence task" processing, in which results are verified by sending the same task to multiple workers, and comparing the results. So we may have more than one set of results for each message. We want to include which worker did each task, so we can check the quality of their work and refer them to more training if needed.

Track which messages have been processed

We don't want to add fields to msg_message just for our module. But we need a way to tell when a message has been processed, so we can select unprocessed messages to give to users. Later, when we add more human intelligence task features such as sending the same task to multiple workers, we'll need somewhere to record how complete the work is for one message.

So we may want to add a table that gets a record added when each message intended for processing arrives. The table should be defined in the same model file as the task table. It should refer to the msg_message record in the same way as above, and should have a boolean field for whether the message is processed. (Later, this can be changed to support processing by multiple workers, but for now, we can consider it done when one worker has processed it.)

We don't want to enter all messages, just ones for our workers (e.g. incoming email for individuals should not be sent to workers). We'll need a way to recognize our messages, e.g. a Twitter direct message recipient or hashtag, or a particular SMS shortcode. There is a new and somewhat experimental feature for selecting out messages, which may be useful for this, but documentation is lacking. This will require consultation on IRC. IF we cannot use this, we can (temporarily) add specialized code in the msg module's incoming message handling to pick out the desired messages and create records for them.

Add a controller function to generate task pages for workers

Look at:

Eden will automatically generate pages that correspond to database tables (list forms) or individual records (read or edit forms), or empty forms for adding new records (create forms). However, when a worker requests a task, there is not yet any database record for the task. Instead, we want to:

  • Select a new, not-yet-processed message.
  • Create a record in the (new) hit_task table (being worked on by the model team).
  • Return the standard form for the new record to the user.

Add a view that presents a task to the worker and submits their work

The worker will get an autogenerated "edit" form, produced by the controller and view code together. If a plain edit form is ok, then this may be a very short task -- it may be that no special view file is needed.. So this can probably be left until after the controller is done.

Generate a list of categories from the database

We would like to encourage workers to use existing categories when there is a close enough match, but be able to add new ones if not. So, we want to give the worker a menu of categories to choose from, consisting of all the current categories found in the category field being added by the team working on adding the new tables, and also let the worker add a new category.

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