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Introduction:

The OpenAmplify API is a web service you can access through a simple request to a URL.

At its simplest, the API reads text you supply and returns linguistic data explaining and classifying the content. What you do with that analysis is, in the fine tradition of APIs and mashups, up to you. Some possibilities might include pairing ads with articles, creating rich tag-clouds, or monitoring the tone of forum threads.

To use the API, you submit text via an HTTP POST or GET request (SOAP is allowed too, but not covered here) using whatever tools are appropriate to your coding language of choice. The API returns linguistic data about the text in any of a variety of formats (XML, JSON, etc) for you to parse and use in your code.

What does OpenAmplify do?

Like other text-analysis software, OpenAmplify identifies the parts of speech in submitted text. However, OpenAmplify goes considerably beyond that by capturing indicators of emotional meaning. For instance, OpenAmplify can identify the prominence of topics in the text, work out how the author feels about them, even see how committed an author is to actions they write about.

No software (yet) can send you back the Cliff's Notes of text you submit, but we think OpenAmplify is leading the race.

Registration and Credits:

Use of the API is free up to the first 1,000 “transactions” per day once you’ve registered for your free API key. Registering for an API key is as simple as signing up as a member of the community. Once you're logged in, go to your profile page to find your personal API key.

The most basic request, submitting text for a single type of analysis (covered below), counts as a single transaction. More complicated requests can eat up more of your day’s free transactions. A schedule is below:

Analysis Request: a single Analysis results in a single transaction. Analysis=all results in two transactions.
Spider Request: a request made using sourceURL results in the retrieval of the specified document from its URL. An additional transaction is charged for this operation.
Document Size: a request made against more than 2.5k of stripped text is charged an additional transaction.

If you anticipate needing more than 1,000 transactions per day, commercial arrangements are available. Contact us here.

Parameters

Regardless of coding language, you will submit parameters - including text or a url you want Amplified - to OpenAmplify's API URL.

API URL:

http://portaltnx20.openamplify.com/AmplifyWeb_v20/AmplifyThis

Parameters:

apiKey=apiKey,
inputText= text || sourceURL= url (e.g.: http://www.someURL.com)
[analysis= all* || topics || actions || demographics || style} ]
[outputFormat = xml* || json || dart ]

* = default

Definitions:

apiKey:

Without a key, your request won't be processed. To get a key, simply register on this site. Once you are logged in, find the link at the top right of the page that says "Edit". Clicking there takes you to the edit screen for your profile, where you will find your API key.

inputText:

InputText is the text you want to submit to OpenAmplify. If you are using a GET request to submit your text, you should make sure to url encode it. Check the documentation for your coding language if necessary. POST requests require no pre-processing for the submitted text.

NOTE: You must include EITHER inputText OR sourceURL. If you submit a value for both, the url will be ignored.

sourceURL:

If you specify an absolute url (e.g. "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_web"), OpenAmplify will scrape the text from that page and analyze the content. However, be aware that the scraper may pick up ads, navigation and other visible text on the page that you don't really want analyzed.

Also, note that OpenAmplify's scraper is occasionally thrown by redirects. If you enter a sourceURL that the receiving server will redirect to another URL, you will probably receive an error. In light of this, try to make sure the URL you submit isn't redirected (for instance, if www.openAmplify.com redirects to www.openamplify.com, use the latter to avoid unnecessary errors).

analysis:

If not specified, the default value of analysis is "all".

all: Returns all of the following analyses
topics: Returns data about the prominent topics in the text
actions: Returns data about the prominent actions in the text
demographics: Returns estimates of the author's demographic information
style: Returns data about the style of the text - works best with longer selections

outputFormat:

outputFormat = xml | empty
The default output format for the OpenAmplify service is xml. There are XML Schema documents for the results of the various analyses:

outputFormat = rdf
If you want to use OpenAmplify results in an RDF environment (such as Protoge - http://protege.stanford.edu/, tested with version 3.4) you can select the rdf output format. The RDF Schema is available at:
http://portaltnx.openamplify.com/AmplifyWeb_v20/rdf/AmplifyRDFFlatOutput.rdfs

outputFormat = rdfa
If you want to annotate your web pages with RDFa annotations (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=99170, http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2008/09/searchmonkey_support_for_rdfa_enabled.html), we output the people and organizations from the OpenAmplify analysis in RDFa format.

outputFormat = csv
If you do not want to parse xml, and will be using a SQL database or Spreadsheet to perform you analysis, we provide the results in Comma Separated Values format. Due to the limitations of the format, this will only return Topics from the Amplify analysis.

outputFormat = DART
If you are using DoubleClick's "DART for Publishers" as serving platform, you can get your OpenAmplify results as a JavaScript variable in DART format. Contact the Community Manager for further assistance integrating OpenAmplify into your DART environment.

outputFormat = oas
If you are using 24-7 Media's OAS ad serving platform, you can get your OpenAmplify results as a JavaScript variable in OAS format. Contact the Community Manager for further assistance integrating OpenAmplify into your 24-7 environment.

outputFormat = json
If you would like to use JavaScript to analyze the OpenAmplify results you can select json to get your results in JSON notation. http://www.json.org/

outputFormat - json_js
Very similar to the json format, except this is already assigned to a JavaScript variable, and can be used in client side scripting via the <SCRIPT SRC=...>

outputFormat - signals
If you want to analyze the results visually in your browser you should select the signals output format. This is a complete html page, with a graphically oriented presentation of the results.

outputFormat - pretty
This is a text oriented html presentation of the results.

Output: Processing the response

The API returns a linguistic analysis of the text you submitted. Data are returned in whichever of the available formats you set in outputformat. If you don't specify a format, the results are returned as XML.

Which data are returned depends on the value you set in the analysis parameter of your request. Setting analysis=all returns information about topics, actions, demographics and style. Using any of the other values returns just the corresponding subset of the full analysis.

A comprehensive overview of the XML's structure is available here.