Evri Blog

We deployed our latest release, and it’s got a ton of good stuff. Coupled with yesterday’s announcement of our iPhone APP (thanks @TechFlash, for covering it!) we have a lot going on.

Here’s what’s in the release. A new home page, featuring our EvriFeed - a constantly updating stream of the latest about interesting topics in the EvriVerse. We use our unique approach to find interesting topics (grammatical subjects and objects in sentences being written on the web) and stream it to the home page. It’s always updating, so check back frequently to find something surprising.

The EvriFeed shows you the Topic in question, a link to the relevant article on the web, and the most recent Evri connections for this topic.

Also on the new home page we are showing more of the breadth and depth of our content in the new Browse box on the right-hand side. You can easily find topics in our major domain — Politics, Entertainment, Business and Sports - or go directly to our full browse experience, which we talked about recently.

Continuing with the Home page, we have made your collections — and other interesting ones — much easier to find. If you haven’t yet created and account and built some collections, you really should. This is the best way to track your outside interests in real-time on the web.

Our Profile pages have new stuff as well. First, we now show you any collections (yours or others) that this topic is part of. This is a great way to discover the power of collections. If you are on the page for Star Trek (the new movie) for example, you can see it’s in three collections, including this one that I created.

We also now provide a way for you to find our how any topic is related to anything you want to type in. Even if it’s not in the Dig Deeper section of the page, you can type in any search term that you want to connect to the current profile and see how they are related. In this case, I was on the Microsoft profile, and wanted to see how they were currently related to Yahoo. I entered Yahoo in the ‘filter by keyword’ box and get the results right there. Cool!

Last thing I’ll mention for now is that we have added interactive stock charts to all of our public company profiles, thanks to our friends at Wikinvest. This is a highly-interactive in-page application that gives more than just a share price. Coupled with the other information we have on the page our company profiles just got a lot more valuable. (Though GM may not feel that about their page today!)

I’ll do follow-up posts exploring some of these features in more detail. Please let us know what you think, and what you would like to see us work on next and what we need to fix. You can always email me (neil[at]evri.com). And don’t forget that you can find us on Twitter: @evri is the company account, and you can get to me @neilr.

The Evri iPhone

Here at Evri we love the iPhone. We know that its been a complete game-changer in the mobile-space. And, it seems like this whole iPhone App thing is catching on. So naturally, with so many iPhone fans in the company we thought to ourselves, “hey, we oughtta write an iPhone app!”

Starting as a “20% Time Project”, we’ve put together our first iPhone application that showcases our unique content browsing and discovery engine — and it’s all built with the same APIs that we expose to external developers. We call it “EvriVerse” and it’s available now in the iTunes App Store. We think it’s pretty nifty.

So what does it do? Well, one of the questions that we’re good at answering here at Evri is “what’s going on right now, out in the world?” With our ever-growing structured data store and deep semantic understanding of dynamic web content, we have an awful lot of connected, contextual, relevant information to play with. We do the work of finding important information about topics you care about, and let you browse them in a new way. Let’s take a look…

The initial EvriVerse screen

When you first start the app, you have two places you can go. You can either search for something specific by touching the magnifying glass, or see what’s making news by touching the rainbow. Let’s start with the hot list.

Selecting an entry from the list will take you to our main view where you can see that topic and its top-five connections. The connections are to People, Products, Organizations or other things out in the world that the topic you are interested in is connected to.

Here I’ve selected Wanda Sykes. Touching one of the related topics allows you navigate the what we call the “Entity Web”. Think of this as the ultimate “Six-Degrees of Kevin Bacon” tool.

Touching the main topic will give you a list of current articles, as well as current actions, top connections and profile information for that topic.

“Actions” and “Connections” give you a new way to browse web content about the topic you are interested in. With Actions you will see just that, a list of verbs your topic is engaged in - visiting, speaking, buying, etc.. Connections will show you what things your topic is connected to. Navigating any of these will take you to the list of articles that help you understand the connection. You can then follow this all the way through to the article — and you didn’t need to do any typing to get there!.

This is just the first release of this application and we have a host of features planned in the future. We hope you find it useful, informative and entertaining. Please do let us know what you think, and what features you think we should add. If you have questions or comments, please visit our iPhone Support Page and leave us a note.

Once again, you can download the app here . If you like it, please rate and review it. If you have a problem, please let us know.

Cheers!

Last week I read about the first Semantic Web meetup in Vancouver, BC organized by Melanie Courtot. I started wondering why we don’t have something similar down here in Seattle given all the folks in the start up arena, academia, and the larger corporate world all working on things involving the word “semantic.” I was chatting w/ Neil, our CEO here at Evri, and he mentioned that Alex Iskold, Founder/CEO of Adaptive Blue and feature writer for ReadWriteWeb, was going to be in town on May 6th; Alex was interested in presenting to a meetup group if there was one. We said, well no, there isn’t one, but lets try to get one together. So, inspired by Melanie, I was just about to create a meetup group on meetup.com, when I got a notice telling me that one had, only moments before, been created by Jillian McRae. Jillian was interested in getting the semantic community together, as well as meeting up with folks heading down to SemTech 2009 in June.  So I joined the group, contacted Jillian, and explained the sequence of events. Jillian replied, “Serendipitous!” So there you have it folks, a swirling nexus of events due to lots of excitement over all things semantic.  Come to our first meetup of soggy Seattlites now Semantically Webbed — mingle with folks, drink some, eat some, and listen to Alex present on Get Glue and other semantic tech. All the details are HERE.

We deployed our latest release last night, and it’s packed with new stuff. Here’s a rundown of the new features.

Browse
You can now browse through all of our millions of entity profile pages! Go here to find the category you are interested in, or just click a category name next to anything on the site. We have everything from Amusement Parks (there are 489 of those) to Zoos (389) and everything in between. You can add anything you want to follow in a Collection directly from the browse lists too.

Quotes & Tweets on Entity Detail Pages
Our profile pages (EDPs) have a couple new features. In addition to the new browse capabilities, you can see related tweets about the topic of the page. We use Evri to process the text of the tweets and find other relevant entities buried in the sometimes overwhelming volume of the Twitter stream.

Want to know who is saying what, about whom? Now you can with the new Quotes feature on Evri.com. You can see quotes by people, and quotes about people, places and things. We use Evri’s linguistic parsing to find quotes in the tens of thousands of sources we read every day. This very cool feature finds what people in the news are talking about and keeps it dynamically updated.



Your favorite things - to go!
Want to take your favorite things with you? Now, from any of our profile pages you can now get embed code so you can put your favorite things anywhere on the web! Perfect for blogs, home pages — anywhere you want to keep up with your interests.

Evri widget for Twitter

Collections
Our Collections feature is a whole new way for you to keep track of your interests on the web. We have given Collections a “newsfeed” view which provides content recommendations based on all the entities in your collection. We comb all our our sources to find the most compelling, up-to-date content about your collection as a whole. Collections are public, so you can easily share them around the web.

In addition, once you’re signed in, you’ll see your username linked in the top right - click this to access a list of all your collections. We added the ability to delete collections from this page as well.

Widget Gallery
In addition to the single topic widget, we also launched a new format, the Post widget. Check out this and all of our other applications here.

It’s in the API
Most of what’s above is, or will shortly be, available in our API. If you are a developer, take a look at our API docs, and please do let us know what you are building.

We want to hear from you.
Send me any feedback, comments, suggestions, ok? Please do try out the new features and let us know what you think. You can email me (neil[at]evri.com), or get to us via twitter, evri or neilr

The evribot and Relationship Triples

The evribot is an automated Twitter account that tweets extremely brief summaries of news stories. We created the evribot to demonstrate how our API extracts meaningful relationships from unstructured documents on the web. The tweets take the form of (subject, link, target) triples that represent the relationship between a subject entity and a target entity. Triples often represent a single sentence, where the link is a verb and the target is the object. Here’s an example taken from the evribot:

[Eric Holder » closing » Guantanamo Bay]
"Obama's new detainee policy: Break from Bush, or the same?"
→ http://ur.ly/9Ll

In this tweet, the triple is (Eric Holder, closing, Guantanamo Bay) and comes from a sentence in the second to last paragraph of the article. Triples can also be used to represent more general relationships between two entities. For example, (Eric Holder, government agency, United States Department of Justice).

While entity tagging allows one to identify the popular people, places, and things that are in the news, our ability to extract these triples allows us to take a stab at why those entities are in the news. One purpose of the evribot experiment is to see if exposing triples to you, our users, is useful. So tell us what you think.

A Few Technical Details

The evribot is driven by a Ruby script that uses the soon to be released evri-api rubygem that wraps the Evri API for convenient use within Ruby. Here’s an outline of the Evri API calls used to extract the triples that make up the evribot’s tweets (all paths are relative to http://api.evri.com):

First, evribot retrieves a list of popular people using /v1/zeitgeist/entities/person/popular. An entity from this list is used to form the subject of the triple. Given a subject entity, the following calls are made to find the link, target, and related article that make up the tweet:

1. The first relation from /v1/person/eric-holder-0×149fdb/relations is used as the link of the triple.
2. The selected relation of the previous query will contain an href attribute that can be used to find the targets of the relation. Again pick the first item.
   /v1/person/eric-holder-0×149fdb/relations/facet/government-agency
3. Finally, use the targetHref provided in the selected target entity to obtain an article /v1/person/eric-holder-0×149fdb/relations/facet/government-agency/organization/united-states-department-of-justice-0×2ad44?media=articles

If you have questions about the Evri API, you can search for answers and ask questions on our developer mailing list. And if you have feedback for evribot, feel free to send it an “@ reply” or direct message with your thoughts.

Why is George W. Bush a criminal?
Why is Joe Biden a football player?
Why is Tiger Woods a journalist?
Why is Britney Spears a director?

Our goal is not to make any editorial decisions about former President Bush or anyone else; in fact, we prefer to not editorialize any of our data. Our philosophy is to allow data to speak for itself.

Why it’s not what you think
We are building our knowledge base from numerous structured and semi-structured data sources, like Freebase and Wikipedia. So, for example, if you head over to Freebase and check out the George W Bush page (http://www.freebase.com/view/en/george_w_bush), you can see under the Crime topic, Freebase has information about his conviction for drunk driving. Although this was years ago in his younger days, in our system, conviction for a crime (at this time, any crime), will lead an individual to be faceted (the broad categories we classify people with – think politician, olympic medalist, and so forth) as a criminal.

Likewise, Joe Biden was the halfback for the Blue Hens football team at his alma mater. the University of Delaware. Tiger Woods writes a weekly column for the Golf Digest, and Britney Spears has directed music videos.  All of these data lead our system to facet these entities accordingly.

Bringing order to the universe is challenging
As the curator, my main efforts involve resolving the structural differences between our sources at a high level, rather than at the individual level. For example, one data source may include individual baseball players classified according to the positions they play. Do we roll all the players together as ‘baseball player’, or do we retain the source’s designations of ‘pitcher’, ‘first baseman’, or do we create a hybrid of both representations?

The decisions we make at the higher level can on occasion translate into seemingly odd classifications. This is why exposing our users to the context of the classifications is so important.  A richer experience with the world’s information is what we are trying to build and is one of the most interesting aspects of what we could do.

We had a great week for the Evri API. At Demo 09 we showed off many of our wares including the recently released Evri Toolbar, our widgets including the Washington Post widget, as well as the entity profile pages; all of these applications are built completely on our public API. I also chatted with many developers about their applications and how the Evri API might help add some powerful features — I was thrilled at the enthusiasm for building on our platform.

In addition to the excitement around Demo 09, I’m happy to announce a few new features in the API. The new work includes:

• support for domain constraints
• support for date constraints
• JSONP support
• alias support for entities
• improved documentation

Support for domain constraints

One of the new features we’ve launched is the ability to constrain your results to particular domains. Below is a screenshot of our Washington Post widget taken from this article titled: New Life for ‘Clean Coal’ Project. In this widget, the default behavior is to include related article results from the washingtonpost.com domain.

This is made possible by the includeDomains and excludeDomains parameters. You can now include a set of domains, or exclude a set of domains for any Get media about an entity resource requests.

Support for date constraints

If you want to constrain related article results to a particular date, you can now do so using the includeDates input parameter like this. For example, we use this API resource to provide trend plots like this one

to show related news, blog posts, and web content on a particular date. This is helpful if you want to find out why a person, place or thing suddenly became important. For example, the screen shot above from the Sri Lanka national cricket team page tragically illustrates the terrorist incident against the team propelled the massive news coverage.

JSONP support

Many of our developers were asking for JSONP callback support. So, voila, its here. See the REST API specification for details on how to use it.

Alias support

Another great little feature is we now include aliases for entities returned in the Get entity network about some text resource. For example, in this sentence:

Seattle, a city in the United States, also known as the USA, or US, is nice in the December months when Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains are rocking out.

if you click HERE to see the returned network, you might notice that US, and USA are returned as aliases for the United States. Our system now automatically recognizes the terms US and USA as aliases, or synonyms, of the United States. This feature is helpful for many applications. For example, some of our developers wanted to track and display to users the common alias forms of an entity so their users can understand what name forms are typically used on the web. In another application, developers wanted to be able to highlight the many forms of an entity on a page. For example, an entity like Barack Obama might be referred to as Obama, Barack, and Barack Obama and the application needs to highlight them all.

Improved documentation

Finally, we’ve had some great feedback from you, our developers, on ways to improve our documenation to make it easier to get started. Special thanks to Doug for really spending a lot of time giving us detailed examples. Among other things, we’ve cleaned up the input parameters section, added additional examples, and added an Example scenarios section to help better communicate how to use the results of one resource call, as input to another.

And on a final note, if you haven’t signed up for our Developer Forum, please do so. It’s the best place to ask questions, and get answers on all things related to the Evri API.

We had a great time both giving and getting demos at DEMO this year - our CEO, Neil Roseman, wrote this about the experience. Thanks to everyone who stopped by our booth to see collections and the toolbar. If you missed the live broadcast, you can watch it here:

Now you can create and share your own collections! Watch the demo, or check out the sample collections we put together for Obama’s Cabinet and Oscar Winners. BTW, the name of your collection doesn’t HAVE to start with the letter “O”…

Click “Follow This” on any profile page to get started (it’ll ask you to create an account if you haven’t already), and don’t forget to share!

Watch it at Vimeo.

If you love Evri, now you can take it everywhere you go online. Download and install the Toolbar Beta (available for Firefox and Internet Explorer), and you’ll start to see yellow highlights show up on the pages you visit. Place your mouse over the highlights and get a description, the latest news, top connections, images, and videos for each highlighted topic.

It also lets you jump to any of our profile pages by typing a name into the Find box.

Learn more or just go and get it!