Fortis comes with a settings page with which you can edit site configurations and also provide details on how events should be monitored and processed.
Through the settings page, you will be able to configure amonst others:
- General settings about your deployment in the "Site Settings" tab
- Blacklist terms and whitelist terms in the "Watchlist" tab.
- Data sources to watch like Twitter, Facebook, Bing, etc in the "Streams" tab.
A full description of all the settings follows in the sections below.
After setting up a new Fortis site, at the very least you should configure the following to start monitoring events:
- A bounding box on the "Site Settings" tab; Fortis will only ingest events that fall inside of the geographical area that you specify on this tab.
- One or more keywords on the "Watchlist" tab; Fortis will only ingest events that match any of the keywords you specify on this tab.
- One or more data sources on the "Streams" tab; Fortis will only ingest events sourced from the data sources that you specify on this tab.
Note: Some stream types, mentioned below, require trusted
sources to be configured for event ingestion.
- RSS
It is necessary to restart the pipeline to update Fortis event ingestion with
your new admin settings. As some configurations may be updated more
frequently than others, these will need a manual pipeline restart. To restart
the pipeline manually, use the restart pipeline button on the corresponding
tab. Configurations that are infrequently changed will have automatic
pipeline restarts.
| Configurations | Pipeline Restart |
|---|---|
| Site Settings | Manual |
| Watchlist | Manual |
| Trusted Sources | Automatic |
| Blacklist | Manual |
| Streams | Automatic |
On this page, you can manage general configuration items for the site such as the geographical area that your site monitors and the languages of events that should be ingested.
Additionally, you can also use this page to update the credentials for third party APIs leveraged by Fortis, such as MapBox and Cognitive Services.
The following list explains the settings managed on this site in more detail:
-
Site Name: Unique identifier for your site. Can't be changed.
-
Site Title: For branding, name of the site displayed on the navigation bar.
-
Bounding Box: The geographical area that Fortis will monitor. The format of the bounding box is:
maxY,minX,minY,maxX. You can use the bounding box tool to find the appropriate coordinates for your geographical area. -
Header Logo Banner: For branding, link to an image that will be displayed next to the site title on the navigation bar.
-
Supported Languages: A list of the ISO 639-1 language codes for all the locales for which you'd like to monitor events in your site. Entries are separated by commas, e.g.
en,arfor Ensligh and Arabic. -
Default Language: The default language of events to display on the dashboard. You can switch to any of the non-default languages from the action buttons toolbar at the bottom of the dasboard UI.
-
Feature Service Namespace: This specifies the granularity of locations that your Fortis site will monitor. Currently supported values are:
wofto monitor places in the entire world, based on Open Street Maps.divipolafor detailed Colombia places. For most deployments,wofis the right choice. If you have more specific location needs, please reach out so that we can work together to integrate your custom location sources into the featureService used by Fortis.
-
MapBox token: Free access token for MapBox, the service used to render the map on the Fortis dashboard. This access key is provided during the initial Fortis deployment.
-
Translation Services Token: Needed for text translation. This access key is set up automatically during the initial Fortis deployment.
-
Cognitive Services Speech Services Token: Needed for real-time audio ingestion and analysis. This access key is set up automatically during the initial Fortis deployment.
-
Cognitive Vision Services Token: Needed for image analysis. This access key is set up automatically during the initial Fortis deployment.
-
Cognitive Text Services Token: Neded for sentiment analysis. This access key is set up automatically during the initial Fortis deployment.
After changing the site settings, you should click the restart pipeline button to propagate the changes to the Fortis event ingestion.
On this page, you can manage the keywords you would like your Fortis site to monitor. Fortis will only ingest and display events that match at least one of the keywords you configure on this page.
Keywords can be grouped into different categories. You can either display events matching all keywords on the dashboard or only the events pertaining to a particular category.
Keywords can be single words such as election or phrases such as election results.
Fortis will only monitor events that match any of the keywords verbatim.
The following list explains the settings managed on this site in more detail:
-
Category: Used to group keywords for separate display on the dashboard.
-
name: The keyword to monitor. Note that currently keywords are limited to 60 bytes in length due to limitations in the Twitter API. The UI will warn you if you add keywords that are too long.
-
name_{language}: Keyword translated into other languages, used to monitor multi-lingual areas.
After changing the watchlist, you should click the restart pipeline button to propagate the changes to the Fortis event ingestion.
To add keywords quickly, you can copy keyword categories and keywords from
excel, then paste them into the corresponding columns of the watchlist
table.
For example, in Excel you may have:
| Category | Name |
|---|---|
| armed conflict | ammo |
| armed conflict | gun |
| health | medicine |
Copying the cell values and pasting them on the "Watchlist" settings tab will automatically populate the page for you.
To get keyword translations in a supported languages, check the rows you would
like translations for and then press the button translate selection(s). This
will leverage the Translator Text API
to automatically localize the keywords.
On this page, you can manage access to your Fortis site. There are currently two
levels of access: admin and user. Users can only log into the site and view
the dashboard. Admins can additionally chage the settings for the site.
If you wish to enable anoymous access to Fortis, you can add the identity
anonymous@fortis to your users list and give it a role such as user.
The following list explains the settings managed on this site in more detail:
-
Identity: The canonical email address of the users who have access to the site. Any Azure Active Directory v2 enabled email provider can be used, including Outlook, GMail, and so forth.
-
Role: The level of access that the user should have,
adminoruser.
Still needs to be implemented.
White-list trusted sources like Twitter accounts or RSS feeds. If you specify trusted sources, Fortis will only ingest events that come from the sources you trust for a particular data source instead of ingesting all the events.
For example, if you add trusted sources for your Twitter pipeline, Fortis will only ingest tweets from those accounts that match the keywords you care about, instead of ingesting all the tweets for anyone in your geographic area for those keywords.
| Column Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Pipeline Key | Refer to All Supported Trusted Sources table below. |
| Name | Friendly name you assign for your trusted source to act as an alias for the external source id. In the dashboard this friendly name will be what is displayed, not the external source id. (external source id will only be displayed if Name is not defined) |
| External Source Id | Refer to All Supported Trusted Sources table below. |
After changing the trusted sources, the pipeline will automatically be restarted.
A table of all supported trusted sources with their associated pipeline keys and descriptions of what to put as their external source ids. If you would like to add a new trusted source type to Fortis you can look in project-fortis-spark's /streamfactories and /analyzers and view their implementations.
| Pipeline Key | External Source Id |
|---|---|
| Bing | A bing page url host like http://nytimes.com. |
| CustomEvent | You as a user would define its structure. |
| Facebook Page Id | |
| HTML | A html page url host like http://nytimes.com. |
Instagram username. |
|
| Radio | Radio station url. |
The author's username of the reddit post. |
|
| RSS | A RSS feed url like https://reliefweb.int/headlines/rss.xml. |
| TadaWeb | Tadaweb source. |
Twitter username |
On this page, you can manage keywords to blacklist in the pipeline.
You can blacklist individual terms such as election to filter from your
pipeline all the events that mention this term at least once.
You can also blacklist co-occurrences of terms to get more fine-grained
control over the events that get filtered out. For example, adding a
blacklist entry lik Trump, Obama, election will only filter out events that
mention each of these three terms at least once.
The following list explains the settings managed on this site in more detail:
-
Blacklisted Terms: A comma delimited list of one or more keywords that if co-occurring in an event's text will lead that event to be excluded from your Fortis site.
-
Is Location: If set to true, the blacklist will look at the event's locations instead of its text to determine whether the event should be excluded. For example, you can use this to exclude all events from a particular city, town or region.
After changing the blacklist, you should click the restart pipeline button to propagate the changes to the Fortis event ingestion.
On this page, you can manage the data sources to which your Fortis site listens.
For each data source, you'll have to provide parameters like API keys, secrets, configuration parameters and so forth. The stream creation wizard will guide you to correctly configure the data sources. If you need to update these parameters in the future, you can edit them on this page.
You can also use this page to manage the life-cycle of the data sources. For example, if you defined a Twitter stream but later decide that you no longer wish to monitor Twitter, you can set the stream to disabled on this page and Fortis will no longer ingest events from Twitter going forward.
The following list explains the settings managed on this site in more detail:
-
Type: The type of stream that your Fortis site is listening to, such as
Twitter,Facebook,Bing, and so forth. -
Status: Whether or not the stream is active or suspended. Fortis will only ingest events from active streams.
-
Edit: Open the editor to modify the stream, for example to update API access credentials.
After changing the streams, the pipeline will automatically be restarted.