🌠 TermMerge (Backend API)

Backend API platform for crowd-sourced word convergences - complements WordNet, which is continually updated and manually tooled by researchers.

Purpose

This backend REST-ful API is the central service of the actual TermMerge platform.

The main tasks of this API server are:

• Creating a data provider that can report a word convergence
• Authenticating a data provider
• Obtaining a reported word convergence
• Getting a real-time stream of reported convergences as they come in.

Tech Stack

The following technologies were used:

• 🐍 Python 3.6 - Main programming language used on the API
• 🐋 Docker - Containerization for quick deployment
• 📊 Neo4J - Graph database for quick querying and graph processing
• 🗒️ Postgres - Relational database for normalized access

Relational Schema

Data is stored on the relational database in normalized form, for allowing all sorts of other algorithms and computation work to be done on the raw data.

user	report	word_timeline
id int	id int	report_id foreign:report.id
name text	user_id foreign:user.id	word string
username text	created_at datetime	branch int
password text	converge string	epoch int
created_at datetime

API Routes

The following are the API routes that can be accessed to utilize the backend API

• POST /user

  • Create a data provider account provided a provider name, username and password. This will automatically generate a data provider id to identify the data provider with whenever reporting a word convergence.
  • Request Body: {name:string, username:string, password:string}
  • Response Body: None

• GET /user/<username:string>

  • Get information about a specific provider
  • Request Body: None
  • Response Body: {name:string, username:string, createdAt:string}

• POST /auth

  • Provided a data provider username and password, return an authentication token that can be used to identify a data provider when it makes a word convergence response.
  • Request Body: {username:string, password:string}
  • Response Body: {token:string}

• POST /convergence

  • Report a word convergence.
  • Request Body: {token:string, converge:string, branch1:[string], branch2:[string]}
  • Response Body: None

• GET /convergence

  • Obtain a URL containing a real-time web socket, which, when binded to, provides a real-time stream of incoming word convergences.
  • Request Body: {socket:string}
  • Response Body: None