Robespierre

~ RSS Metadata collector daemon ~
Developed by Christian Visintin
Current version: 0.1.0 (08/12/2020)

• Robespierre
  • About Robespierre 🎯
  • Features 🎁
  • Setup 🛠
    • Install Robespierre 📦
    • Initialize the database 💾
    • Write your own configuration 📝
    • Run Robespierre
  • Contributing 🤝🏻
  • Known Issues 🩹
  • Upcoming Features 🧪
  • Changelog ⏳
  • License 📃

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About Robespierre 🎯

Robespierre is a daemon written in Java, which purpose is to collect data from RSS feeds. What makes Robespierre special in what it does, is that it is able to collect also the involved persons (named "subjects") and topics from the articles. To do so, Robespierre reads the feed titles and briefes and tokenize words according to a certain logic, then Robespierre will query a Metadata Provider to look for persons and topics involved in the provided feed. At the moment Robespierre gathers these metadata from Wikidata, but it wouldn't be harsh to implement a new Metadata receiver.

Features 🎁

• Easy to setup 😎

  Just write an easy JSON configuration file and you're done

• Can collect information from any RSS source in any language 🌍

  Just provide the URI, the engine and the feed language

• Fully schedulable based on your needs 🕔

  You can easily set fetch intervals for each feed source

• Everything you need get stored into a relational database 💾

  Robespierre collects a lot of data from feeds, in details:

  1. title
  2. brief
  3. link to original article
  4. date
  5. country of the feed source
  6. involved subjects - name - birthdate - citizenship - birthplace - uri to an image - brief of their biography - occupation
  7. involved topics - name - description

• The more it works, the more reliable and faster it gets 🚀

  Thanks to how it is implemented, the metadata scraper, gets faster every time learning from its mistakes

• Can interface with different databases 🍥

  Since the database connector is implemented in an abstract way, changing the database just means changing a few keys in the configuration file

• Can interface with different metadata providers 💁🏻‍♀️

  Changing the metadata providers, just means changing a key in the configuration file

• Written in Java 11 ☕

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Setup 🛠

Let's see in a step-by-step guide, how to setup Robespierre.

Install Robespierre 📦

Download artifact from latest release

Specify also: -Dlog4j.configuration="path.to.my.config.xml"

Initialize the database 💾

Robespierre supports one of these database:

• mariadb

once you've installed and configure the basic parameters for it, we can start creating the Robespierre database.

1. Choose a name for your database; in this example I will use robespierre.

2. Open the init file for your database, which is located at ./database/init-{YOUR_DATABASE}.sql

3. Change names and columns based on your needs

   Change the database name, if you're using another name:

   CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS robespierre; -- Change with your name
   
   USE robespierre; -- Change with your name

   Add or remove language columns; languages must be ISO639 compliant

   CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS occupation (
     id CHAR(36) NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
     it CHAR(128),
     en CHAR(128), -- Add or remove columns (e.g. fr, de...)
   );
   
   --- ...
   
   CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS biography (
     id CHAR(36) NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
     it MEDIUMTEXT,
     en MEDIUMTEXT, -- Add or remove columns (e.g. fr, de...)
   );
   
   CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS topic_data (
     id CHAR(36) NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
     name_it CHAR(64),
     desc_it MEDIUMTEXT,
     name_en CHAR(64),
     desc_en MEDIUMTEXT, -- Add or remove columns (e.g. fr, de...)
   );

4. Setup the blacklist

   Robespierre uses a blacklist to prevent some false positives while scraping for metadata. For instance, Wikidata, when finds the word spagna (which in italians is Spain), will return Ivana Spagna, who is a singer. Blacklist's purpose is to prevent these false positives, based on your needs. I've created a simple blacklist based on my needs, but I'd be glad if you could contribute to this project adding further words in blacklist, maybe ordered by language and category. See Contributing.

   Then, check the file ./database/blacklist-{METADATA_PROVIDERsql and select the words, you want to blacklist for your installation.

Write your own configuration 📝

You just need to write a JSON file, which looks like this:

{
  "database": {
    "engine": "mariadb",
    "uri": "jdbc:mariadb://localhost:3306/robespierre",
    "user": "mydbuser",
    "password": "mysecret"
  },
  "feed": {
    "maxWorkers": 2,
    "sources": [
      {
        "uri": "http://xml2.corriereobjects.it/rss/politica.xml",
        "country": "IT",
        "interval": 720,
        "engine": "rss"
      },
      {
        "uri": "https://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/Politics.xml",
        "country": "US",
        "interval": 60,
        "engine": "rss"
      },
      {
        "uri": "https://www.lefigaro.fr/rss/figaro_politique.xml",
        "country": "FR",
        "interval": 240,
        "engine": "rss"
      },
      {
        "uri": "https://www.spiegel.de/politik/index.rss",
        "country": "DE",
        "interval": 240,
        "engine": "rss"
      }
    ]
  },
  "metadata": {
    "engine": "wikidata",
    "cache": {
      "duration": 180,
      "withBlacklist": true
    }
  }
}

where:

• database: contains the database configuration
  • engine: the database engine; available engines: "mariadb"
  • uri: database uri
  • user: database user
  • password: database password
• feed: contains the feed configuration
  • maxWorkers: maximum amount of workers (threads) instantiated to fetch sources
  • sources: contains the feed sources configuration
    • engine: the feed protocol; available engines: "rss"
    • uri: feed uri
    • country: feed country, code must be ISO6166-1 alpha-2 compliant.
    • interval: interval in minutes for fetching source
• metadata: contains the metadata configuration
  • engine: the engine to be used; available engines: "wikidata"
  • cache: contains the cache configuration; the cache is used to prevent fetching data from metadata provider, but to use the local database as provider instead
    • duration: duration, in days, of the cache
    • withBlacklist: describes whether the blacklist should be used

Run Robespierre

Run Robespierre with these options:

-p <pidfile>: to write pidfile at provided location -c <config_file>: specify the JSON configuration file path

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Changelog ⏳

View CHANGELOG

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License 📃

Licensed under the MIT license; you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

You can read the entire license HERE