Clair is a project to collect prices on E-Commerce sites, and display them in graphical form. It is aimed at used goods, that are not labeled with product IDs, but that are described with natural languages. Product recognition is semi automatic and uses natural language processing.
Clair is named after Wesley Clair Mitchell, an important US economist, who mainly worked empirically and collected a big database of prices. Mitchell also believed that markets need to be regulated, and was influential in creating the New Deal.
The software is currently in an alpha stage. There are no usable components, not even crude programs, that can be tested without much effort.
Clair is written in Python (version 3) with the Django web framework, the GUI parts are planned to be written in Javascript with the Angular framework. It can currently only communicate with Ebay.
Clair needs fairly many libraries to function:
- Python Ebaysdk
A library to communicate with Ebay over the Internet. Ebay seems to treat this library as the official Python API. https://github.com/timotheus/ebaysdk-python
- Pandas
A data analysis toolkit for time series. http://pandas.pydata.org/
- Numpy
A library for n-dimensional arrays, and numerical computations. http://www.numpy.org/
- NLTK
A library for processing natural (written) language. http://nltk.org/
- Django
A framework do create web applications (runs on the server). https://www.djangoproject.com/
- Django REST framework
An extension for Django to create an API, so that other programs can easily communicate with the server. http://www.django-rest-framework.org/
- Pytest
A test framework that works well for test driven development. https://docs.pytest.org/en/latest/
- Pytest-Django
An extesion for Pytest to work with Django. https://pytest-django.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
- AngularJS
A framework for complex applications in Javascript, that run in the browser.
- Bootstrap
A CSS and Javascript framework for styling applications.
There is currently no installation script. But there is requirements.txt, that lists all Python libraries, that need to be installed.
You can use the following commands (preferably in a virtualenv) to: Clone the repository, install the necessary libraries, set up the server, and run it:
git clone https://github.com/eike-welk/clair.git
cd clair/
pip install -r requirements.txt
cd src/clairweb/
python manage.py migrate
python manage.py createsuperuser
python manage.py runserverThe applications is run in the source directory (src/clairweb). Be sure to use Python version 3, which is named python3 in many Linux distributions. (But it is named python in virtualenv.)
To communicate with Ebay over its API, you need an Ebay developer key, which can be easily obtained through Ebay's developer website:
Some information from your Ebay developer keys must be filled into the file src/clairweb/ebay-sdk.apikey.example. The file must then be renamed into src/clairweb/ebay-sdk.apikey.
There is example data in the directory example-data/, however the application currently can't read it.