README.txt

python-calais v.1.4 -- Python interface to the OpenCalais API

This Python module is a wrapper around the OpenCalais API as documented at http://www.opencalais.com/calaisAPI by Reuters. It makes REST calls to the OpenCalais API via HTTP POST, then parses and simplifies the JSON responses returned by OpenCalais. You can then access the response data in a much more pythonic manner.

The module has only been tested with Python 2.5.

Dependencies:

    * simplejson (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/simplejson) 

Basic Usage:

To use the OpenCalais API, first create a Calais() object, passing it your OpenCalais API key and a string identifier of your application:

>>> from calais import Calais
>>> API_KEY = "your-opencalais-api-key"
>>> calais = Calais(API_KEY, submitter="python-calais demo")

You can then use the analyze() method.  It takes a string, containing the text to be analyzed by Calais and returns a CalaisResponse() object:

>>> result = calais.analyze("George Bush was the President of the United States 
of America until 2009.  Barack Obama is the new President of the United States now.")

Or you can use the analyze_url() method, which downloads the specified HTML page and passes it on to OpenCalais:

>>> result2 = calais.analyze_url("http://www.bestofsicily.com/mafia.htm")

The CalaisResponse class provides several helper methods that print information about the response:  

>>> result.print_summary()
Calais Request ID: 0bfa1f51-4dec-4a82-aba6-a9f8243a94fd
Title:
Language: English
Extractions:
        4 entities
        1 topics
        2 relations
>>> result.print_topics()
Politics
>>> result.print_entities()
Person: Barack Obama (0.29)
Country: United States of America (0.43)
Person: George Bush (0.43)
Country: United States (0.29)
>>> result.print_relations()
PersonPoliticalPast
        person:George Bush
        position:President
PersonPolitical
        person:Barack Obama
        position:President of the United States


Or you can access the results directly:

>>> print result.entities[0]["name"]
Barack Obama


You can also set processing and user directives before you make an analyze() call:

>>> calais.user_directives["allowDistribution"] = "true"
>>> result3 = calais.analyze("Some non-confidential text", external_id=calais.get_random_id())

Please report bugs or feature requests at the Google Code issue tracker for this project at http://code.google.com/p/python-calais/issues/list

This project is sponsored by A115 Ltd. (www.a115.bg/en/)