MPTrends: showing which places MPs talk about
Which places do MPs talk about?
This service analyzes the text of an MPs parliamentary contributions, extracting places they mention by name. It presents these on a map interface, one point per mention.
We use TheyWorkForYou to provide structured text from parliament, OpenCalais to identify placenames from that text, and Google Maps to display them.
One-day hack project from February 2012 API Hackathon (http://apihackathonlondon.eventbrite.com/). We won 2nd place!
It is currently running at http://viz.ohuiginn.net/
Install
- Get API Keys
2 API keys are required, in a file private.py. This is not in github to prevent misuse. You will need to get keys from:
Create the file private.py containing the keys: KEY_CALAIS = 'XXX' KEY_TWFY = 'XXX'
- Install python libraries
Libraries for opencalais and theyworkforyou are included in this repo Tornado and memcached libraries are also required, and can be installed with:
$ pip install tornado python-memcached
- install memcached
We expect memcached to be running on port 11211. You can arrange this on debian/ubuntu with:
#apt-get install memcached
- Set up web server
To run the web service, you will need a webserver pointing urls in /code at the tornado process (on port 9000), and everything else at the static content in /site
An config file for nginx is included. Copy this into /etc/nginx/sites-enabled, and reload nginx ("/etc/init.d/nginx reload"). You'll probably need to modify it for your own domain etc.
- start it up
$ python site.py
#Getting the Pyramid project running
There is also a Pyramid project in the MPTrends dir that uses Google Charts API and Dan's work with the TWFY API. A very broken version of it was submitted to GDG for the IO 2012 "Hack for Good" hackathon.
It's a breeze to get running using virtualenvwrapper. On Ubuntu, from the project root:
sudo apt-get install virtualenvwrapper
mkvirtualenv mptrends --no-site-packages
workon mptrends
cd MPTrends
python setup.py develop
pserve development.ini --reload
#Credits