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Muddy

Making your content more findable and connected

Developer Guide

  1. Introduction
  2. Authentication
  3. Request Limits
  4. Methods:
    1. Extract
    2. Collections
    3. Pages
    4. Related Pages
    5. Entities
    6. Related Entities

This guide is intended for developers who are building web-based content categorisation and data mining applications which require structured data sets, querying the data sets, and quickly returning results.

Overview of the service

Muddy is a web service for categorising and data mining text-based content content. It uses Wikipedia as a data source of notable things ('entities') that occur in content.

The service categorises content by the entities it identifies in the content it is supplied. It uses intelligent extraction technology to determine the key pieces of text in your content, ignoring sidebars and footers. It understands ambiguous terms and finds the correct meaning in your content.

The notable entities in your content are enriched by linking them to dbpedia. For example, given a location, additional information such as latitude & longitude or population statistics can be retrieved.

The service stores the results of the categorisation process and allows you to query your content in different ways.

About the API

The Muddy API is designed to be RESTful. This means that each resource is identified by a unique URL, and that URLs respond to the four HTTP methods: GET, POST, PUT and DELETE.

The URLs used by the API are the same as those used when browsing your data from the dashboard, the difference is only the format of the response. You can specify a preferred response format by sending an HTTP Accept: header. Currently, we support the following formats:

  • application/xml
  • application/json

The Muddy API isn't versioned, however new releases are designed to be backward-compatible with older versions. However, there might be occasions where an incompatible API change is required. In these cases, advance notice will be provided on the Muddy website.

Available libraries

Ruby - muddyit_fu

REST API requests

This section provides information on making REST requests with the muddy.it web service.

  1. About REST requests
  2. Sample REST response

About REST requests

muddy.it REST calls are made using HTTP GET/POST/PUT and DELETE requests. Additional call parameters are specified as HTTP query parameters. The response is dependant on the requesting mime-type from the HTTP Accepts header, which should be one of :

Sample REST response

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<response status="OK">
  <created-at>2009-04-01T22:56:30Z</created-at>
  <identifier>65c02056-e561-455c-ac6f-239415160711</identifier>
</response>