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GCPE’s primary role is to inform the public about government programs, services, policies, and priorities through traditional communication practices and, increasingly, through direct engagement and online services.
One of GCPE’s featured services to clients is Today’s News Online Media Monitoring. Through this application, GCPE tracks breaking news stories in British Columbia, Canada, and around the world that impact our province.
The TNO application provides a variety of key services to senior executives throughout government including near-live issue alerts, morning and evening summary reports, as well as in-depth media analysis of key government initiatives and issues.
The application also provides government staff with direct access to all events held in the Legislature Press Theatre including Dr. Bonnie Henry's weekly press conferences on the COVID-19 outbreak.
Today's News Online (TNO) is a news aggregation system that takes in news sources of varying types and provides a single location for clients to access the data.
| Subject | Description |
|---|---|
| Get Started | How to setup your local environment and get developing |
| Development | Dependencies and container management |
| Questions | Questions and Inquires that need answers |
| Application Workflow | Solution workflow processes and components |
| Architecture | How everything is wired together |
| DevOps | Setup and configure environments and pipelines to support automated build, test, and deploy |
| Security | Authentication, membership, roles, and network |
| Infrastructure | Infrastructure and environments to support solution |
| Queue | Kafka - Publisher/Subscriber services |
| User Subscription | User subscription, review and approval process |
| Search | Elasticsearch - Indexing and searching content |
| Database | PostgreSQL - Application data location |
| Ingest Services | .NET - Console service applications that ingest and transform content from 3rd parties |
| API | .NET - RESTful API to support the applications |
| App: Editor | React - Web application to support editors managing the app and content |
| App: Subscriber | React - Web application to support subscribers viewing and searching content |
| Historical User Management | Historical solution sign-up and management of user authentication |
| Historical Scheduling | Jorel scheduling review and new system design pointers |
| Audio/Video Editing | A review of Windows audio/video editing software |
The intent of this project is to modernize the TNO platform, redesigning, -re-architecting and rebuilding the TNO system to meet the growing demand and reporting requirements of the system.
The solution will be design with the following goals; Modern, Containerized, Cloud, Microservice, Secure, Responsive, Scalable, Maintainable, Upgradeable, and Engaging.
Listen, receive, and Import content. Organize and identify each type of media content. Manage connections and sources. Copy content to data store. Constantly checking for new or updated content.
Storage of content on file shares, database, and cloud storage. Some content begins its lifecycle here by being uploaded directly by publishers. Make content available for the duration of its lifecycle.
Video and audio content must be transcribed, or the transcription provided with the content must be extracted. Editors must have opportunity to proof transcripts prior to alerting. Separate streams for English, Punjabi and Cantonese content. NEW FEATURE - automated transcription of raw A/V feed scanning for key words or issues. COMPLAINT - transcripts need to come out much quicker.
All content goes through Natural Language Processing to extract information that can be indexed.
All content is indexed so that it can be analyzed, categorized, identified, and searched. New content must be indexed immediately for report and alert inclusion. NEW FEATURE - notification system so editors are aware of new content.
Editor app enables creating, reviewing, editing, and publishing content. Generate and maintain reports, alerts, and subscriptions. Administrative tools for user management, scheduling, reports, and alerts.
Subscriber app enables users to view and search content. Generate reports and alerts. COMPLAINT - clients can't find what they are looking for on current site. Only search e-mail for alerted content before contacting TNO for help.
Scheduled notifications containing aggregated categorized content. Real time activity based alerts. COMPLAINT - alerts not close enough to real time. Report send times are unreliable. Can't find reports in Outlook - always ending up in trash or junk.
Support existing TNO products including, Front Pages, Top Stories, TNO Morning Report and TNO Overview. All manually sent by TNO editors.
Enforce licensing agreements for archiving and purging content. Binary files, excluding live events, can be retained on the site for three months and then archived on a "CD, DVD or equivalent technology". Transcripts can be retained for ten years. Live event binary files and transcripts can be retained indefinitely.
Generate CBRA reports for license payment and reporting. Report details include: running time by program (hh:mm:ss), source (hh:mm:ss), number of excerpts which exceed ten minutes, total number of CBRA items posted, items which do not meet qualified subject matter and staff time spent on CBRA content broken down by staff person.
Provide analytics on all aspects of the solution.
Provide tools, automation, and infrastructure to support the solution
Develop new analytics to replace and/or amalgamate historic data such as circulation, reach, earned media, etc. New analytics must be live.
Develop new client products - Event Report Card - QP Report Card - Top Issues (AM) & (PM).
Experiment outsourcing social media monitoring was unsuccessful. Adopt hybrid model with analytics available through TNO fed through either new aggregator or Talkwaker.