More Evri API Goodies
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.