Evri Blog

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!

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.

We’re pretty excited today, as we are opening the beta and removing the password restriction to the site. We think this is the first step on a long journey in making the web better for browsing and discovering what’s important and meaningful to you. With almost a billion connections between People, Places and Things contained in millions of documents written every day, our widgets and Profile Pages are designed to let you discover more, with less work.

We’re rolling out some new features along with opening the system up to everybody.

• Use the widget on your site! You can now directly add the widget to your TypePad, Blogger or WordPress blog post, or cut-and-paste some script to add it to any blog or web page.
• Try it with your own content: Just paste your text into the submit box on this page, and see what the Evri content recommendation widget comes up with. Try it with a blog post, article, or any text at all. As with the rest of Evri, it will work best with documents about People, Products, and Things of general interest.
• Sharing: Share a favorite profile page, or even a cool grammatical query your built in Evri’s Garden.
• Image Carousel: We have added photos in addition to videos to every Profile Page. We will be continue to enrich the media experience of the site over the next weeks and months.
• Our Garden, where we will feature new stuff that isn’t ready for release, and behind-the-scenes technology that we use at Evri. Right now we have our unique search technology featured there. We will have another blog post with more details, but you can play with it right now.

We are all happy with, and excited by, what we’ve gotten done so far, but I am sure we have a lot more to do, and do better. There’s is a feedback link on every page and we would really like you to use it. Or, send me feedback directly to neil@evri.com.

images on the new Vicky Cristina Barcelona Profile page.