The goal of datawi.re is to provide journalists and other researchers with an easy-to-use way to subscribe to a feed of data records that may be of interest. To effectively track topics, people, organisations and places of interest, datawi.re will help its users to create semantic, structured watchlists.

Matching records will be sent to users via e-mail and retained on a match list for later analysis. The service itself will not infinitely store data, i.e. the system will not be able to perform aggregate analysis (e.g. trends) itself.

In many ways, datawi.re is adapting the model of twitter's activity feed, replacing status updates with data records and the users which you follow with your entity watchlist.

Developers will be able to submit data records to datawi.re by specifying a service profile, enabling the easy integration with existing scrapers or streaming data services.

The main instance of datawi.re will be deployed at http://datawi.re and accessible to anyone. These instructions are for making a developer installation of datawi.re. If you want to set up a production site you'll need to tweak these instructions.

Before installing datawi.re itself, make sure you have the following dependencies available on your system (consider using Vagrant to isolate the project):

• A relational database supported by SQLAlchemy, we recommend using PostgreSQL.
• RabbitMQ 2.7.1 or newer
• Python 2.7 and virtualenv
• Twitter's bower for installing JS dependencies.
• UglifyJS
• SASS

As well as installing these packages, you also need the following services set up to work with:

• An Amazon Web Services account with an access key and secret.
• An OAuth-enabled Twitter application, created through their developer site. Make sure to configure the callback URL as http://127.0.0.1:5000/sessions/twitter/callback.
• A Facebook app with an app ID and secret.

When you set up datawi.re, first check out the application from GitHub, create a virtual environment and install the Python dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/arc64/datawi.re.git
cd datawi.re
virtualenv env
source env/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
python setup.py develop 
bower install

If you're unfamiliar with virtualenv, be aware that you will need to execute the source env/bin/activate command each time you're working with the project.

Next, you'll need to configure datawi.re. Create a copy of the file datawire/default_settings.py, e.g. as settings.py in the repository base. Open the file and set up the various account configurations. A particularly important setting is STORE_URL, as it decides whether data frames will be stored locally or on Amazon S3:

# Store data on S3, in the given bucket:
STORE_URL = 's3://frames.datawi.re/'

# Store data in your back yard:
STORE_URL = 'file:///var/lib/datawire'

Make sure to also set up SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI to be a valid connection string.

Once the new configuration is set up, you need to set two environment variables: the first will point datawi.re at the configuration file, while the second specifies a secret key to be used by your instance.

export DATAWIRE_SETTINGS=`pwd`/settings.py
export DATAWIRE_SECRET="rosebud"

Finally, you can create the database schema with the management command:

python datawire/manage.py createdb

For testing purposes, you can also install a sample service like this:

make service

Finally, you can run datawi.re. Be aware that two services need to be alive at any time: the web frontend and background processing server. Thus, you'll need two terminal windows for development

# Terminal 1: web service
python datawire/manage.py runserver 

# Terminal 2: queue processing
python datawire/manage.py process

Copyright (c) 2013, Friedrich Lindenberg, Annabel Church

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.