Monitor API Tutorial, Part 4: Simple Client Continued

Owned by Fredrik Espinoza (Deactivated)
Last updated: Sept 14, 2017 by Nina Viereckel
2 min read

This is a basic tutorial series for using the Monitor API v2

Monitor API Getting Sentiment for the Target

In the second part of this tutorial we listed the publicly available targets by making an API call. If you missed that part, consider going back. We will now use that target to get some useful data. We will extract some attitudinal data (sentiment) as a time series for this target. If you are not familiar with the concept of measuring sentiment for targets, you can also revisit Monitor API Tutorial, Part 3: Basic Concepts.

  1. Recall the id of the target that you chose from the earlier section of the tutorial. For the rest of this tutorial part let's call it ID.

  2. Consult the API documentation and look for a resource called

    /observers/{id}/sentiments

    As usual, the API documentation will list options and details about how to proceed when making a request for this resource. The specific page is here.

  3. Make the call by specifying the startDate and endDate and have a look at the results. You can use the browser address field to enter the request or use one of the Chrome extensions. Here is an example call:
    https://ethersource.gavagai.se/ethersource/rest/v2/observers/6082/sentiments?apiKey=9d14e0sdeu&timestampBegin=2014-02-20+00:00:00+CET&timestampEnd=2014-02-25+00:00:00+CET&resolution=DAY. If you can't see any results there have a look at Example Sentiment Output.

Obviously, making API calls using a browser window or an extension tool is not really viable for making an application of your own. You really need to do some programming to make the calls and receive and interpret the data. You can use any programming language of your choice but in the examples provided in the API documentation we have used java. For this tutorial, we will not use any programming language but instead we leave it up to the reader to choose.

Next Steps

  • Use some programming language with support libraries for making RESTful API calls and interpreting JSON output to make a small program to retrieve the sentiment and perhaps graph it.
  • Go on to the next step of the tutorial which will show you how to create your own target (coming soon)