17.10.1. Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT)¶
This directory provides GDELT GeoMesa ingest commands and converter configuration files.
GDELT Event Database periodically scans news articles and uses natural language processing to identify “the people, locations, organizations, counts, themes, sources, emotions, quotes and events driving our global society every second of every day.”
GDELT data is updated each morning at 6am.
17.10.1.1. Getting GDELT data¶
GDELT has two different formats, the original 1.0 and the new 2.0 format. See
the GDELT documentation,
for more information. GeoMesa provides simple feature types and converters for both,
named gdelt
and gdelt2
, respectively.
The GDELT data set can be downloaded using the provided
download-data.sh
script in $GEOMESA_ACCUMULO_HOME/bin/
as such
./download-data.sh gdelt
Alternatively, download the GDELT from the GDELT events
page, select the zip
file for the desired day, then unzip
this in a convenient directory.
This will result in a single CSV file.
Be aware that these files are actually tab-delimited, but are given the CSV extension for compatibility purposes. For this reason, be careful when modifying and saving these files in software like Excel as commas may be automatically inserted, breaking ingest functionality due to records like “Baltimore, Maryland”.
For more information on features of the GDELT data, see their documentation here.
17.10.1.2. Ingest Commands¶
Check that the gdelt
and gdelt2
simple feature types are available on the GeoMesa
tools classpath. This is the default case.
$ geomesa-accumulo env | grep gdelt
If it is not, merge the contents of reference.conf
to
$GEOMESA_ACCUMULO_HOME/conf/application.conf
, or ensure that
reference.conf
is in $GEOMESA_ACCUMULO_HOME/conf/sfts/gdelt
.
Run the ingest. You may optionally point to a different accumulo
instance using -i
and -z
options. See geomesa-accumulo help ingest
for more detail.
$ geomesa-accumulo ingest -u USERNAME -c CATALOGNAME -s gdelt -C gdelt gdelt_data.csv
Any errors in ingestion will be logged to $GEOMESA_ACCUMULO_HOME/logs
.