We the Entities

We the Entities adds rich entities, sentiment analysis, and other text-based analysis on petitions taken from the White House's We the People application.

It provides a summary of the "entities" (e.g. people, places, organizations), themes, and phrases from petitions. It also discerns the sentiment of the author towards these entities (i.e. negative, neutral or positive).

We the Entities includes a petition browser and a Developer API.

Under the covers, We the Entities leverages text analysis services like Open Calais, AlchemyAPI, and Semantria to extract information from the petition title and body.

Table of Contents

• Live Application
• About
• Issues
• Contributing
  • Configuring API Keys
  • Configuring Redis
  • Sidekiq
  • Steps for running locally
• License

Live Application

The We the Entities application is live at: http://www.wetheentities.org/

The underlying Heroku app is deployed to: http://wetheentities.herokuapp.com/

Issues

To report problems, ask questions, track enhancements, etc. please use Github issues.

About

We the Entities is being developed as part of the National Day of Civic Hacking event at the White House. It leverages the We the People API to access petition data.

Contributors:

• Yoni Ben-Meshulam
• Alec Turnbull

Contributing

To contribute, fork the application on Github and send Yoni Ben-Meshulam a pull request.

We the Entities is a Ruby on Rails application.

Configuring API Keys

We the Entities relies on several external APIs in order to work, including:

• Semantria
• Open Calais
• AlchemyAPI

In order to run the application on a local environment, you must set API keys for all three services:

ALCHEMY_API_KEY=ABC123
OPEN_CALAIS_LICENSE_ID=ABC123
SEMANTRIA_CONSUMER_KEY=ABD123
SEMANTRIA_CONSUMER_SECRET=DEF456

Configuring Redis

We the Entities uses a Redis store for job queueing and caching. To configure the Redis server, set:

REDISTOGO_URL

If not set, a default Redis URL will be used:

redis://127.0.0.1:6379/0/wetheentities

This default should work on a standard Redis install, for example on OS X:

brew install redis
redis-server /usr/local/etc/redis.conf

Sidekiq

We the Entities uses the sidekiq Ruby gem for background workers to run semantic analysis.

Steps for running locally

Start Redis

redis-server /usr/local/etc/redis.conf

Start sidekiq

foreman run bundle exec sidekiq -q high,5 default

Start Rails server

foreman run rails server

Run tests

foreman run bundle exec rake

Run an individual test

foreman run bundle exec rake TEST=path/to/test.rb

License

This software is distributed under the MIT License. For more information, see LICENSE