Unlock Text: new API

With apologies for the long hiatus on the Unlock blog. We have been active in development of the service behind the scenes. Now the Unlock team are pleased to present a new API to Unlock Text, the geoparsing (place name text mining and mapping) service.

Read the Getting Started guide: http://unlock.edina.ac.uk/texts/getstarted or jump straight to the full Unlock Text API documentation

Project Bamboo - research apps, infrastructure
Meanwhile, we’ve been working with the US-based, Mellon-funded Bamboo project, a research consortium building a “Scholarly services platform” of which geoparsing is a part. We’ve been helping Bamboo to define an API which can be implemented by many different services.

Bamboo needed to be able to send off requests and get responses asynchronously and to be able to poll to tell whether a geoparsing task is done. The resulting approach feels much more robust than our previous API to the geoparser (which had a long wait time on large documents, complained about document type); is better suited to batches or collections of texts, which most people will be in practise working with.

We hope others find the new Unlock Text API useful. We have a bit of a sprint planned in the coming weeks and would be happy to accept any requests for new features or improvements, please get in touch with the Unlock team if there’s something you’re really missing.