Parsing real-time information that streams down a screen as a list of short text updates isn’t easy. Thanks to two new visualization tools from PostRank, however, the company’s users can now use PostRank’s new entity extraction feature to see real-time updates in your stream on a map and through a tree map interface. These two new features will be available to developers through Postrank’s real-time API. You can also find demos of PostRanks real-time geo and entity trends here and here.
The tree map view gives news organizations the ability to quickly see which of topics and stories they are tracking are currently trending. PostRank analyzes the updates it receives in real-time and extracts proper names, places and things. The tree map, which updates in real-time, then displays these updates and ranks them according to “share of voice.” PostRank also performs sentiment analysis on these updates and colors the updates accordingly.
The geo map works similarly, but instead of extracting proper names, places and things, this algorithm just focuses on places. Thanks to this, a PostRank customer can easily see which cities, countries and regions are currently being mentioned online.
The demos are now available in PostRank’s new Labs section – which opened earlier this month.
