DI.12 Monitoring : What they do and how to create a monitoring

Digimind Intelligence Monitoring Agents

Digimind Monitoring Agents are the parts of the software that will track the internet for you, making your life easier as you won't have to check the pages yourself.  They look for new information published on the sources they track and bring it back to you if the information matches the filter in the agent.

Agents work with two sets of information: a filter and sources.  They check the sources for new posts and bring those posts that match the filter back into the platform as alerts.

Set Up an Agent

You need to be a tracker, animator or administrator on DI.12 in order to be able to set up an agent.

Agents are in the settings.  Click on the cog in the top right corner of the screen to open the settings.

This will take you to the back office of Digimind Intelligence, where you can set up and organise your monitoring projects and agents.  The settings will open on the projects page:

You can create an agent directly inside a project or you can view the agents you have by clicking on the agents tab.  The agents tab shows all the monitorings you can access:

 

Create a monitoring agent

If you are working on a base that was created after May 2016, you will need to create monitorings inside a project.

On older versions of Digimind Intelligence, you can also create a monitoring from the agent page.  From the agent page, click on create agent:

Or you can create an agent inside a project, open the project, click on advanced settings and then add new monitoring:

 

Helpful hints: create a monitoring agent in a project or from the agents page?

Monitoring agents will work no matter where you create them, but you will benefit from some advantages if you create the monitoring agent inside a project.  Monitorings are attached to projects by an assisted validation rule.  This means that when you validate or store the information in a Digimind Intelligence project:

1. tags can be automatically applied
2. the destination folder will be preselected for you

To find out more about validation rules you can follow this link.

 

Name and save your agent

Working from the agents pages:

Working from inside a project:

Helpful Hint: Monitoring Agent Name

Your agents will be organised in alphanumeric order.  An easy way to find all the agents that cover the same theme is to use the following naming structure: project name - agent scope - types of source

If you create your monitoring agents inside a project, they will be grouped together in the project, and as a result, easier to find and to navigate between.

Configure your monitoring

Once you have saved the agent, you will be taken to the next page, where you can add a filter to the agent and give it some sources to track. 

It is a good idea to add the filter before you add any sources to the agent.  Otherwise, the agent will consider all new information it finds in the sources as being of interest to you.  You may find yourself with a certain amount of less then pertinent alerts if you add the sources before the filter.

At the top of the monitoring agent, click on the filter icon:

This will open the query writer.  You can now select a list to include in the filter:

You can also compete the list with specific keywords for this agent.  In the example below I have added the list called credit cards - major concepts and completed this with keywords to track specifically American Express:

To find out more about working with the operators that combine your keywords you can read this post.

Helpful Hints: Using lists and keywords in an agent

A list is a good way to store queries that you would like to use in more than one agent.  This will help you to insert the queries more quickly.  To find out more about working with lists you can follow this link.

Keywords can be added to the filter in a particular agent to help focus this agent onto a specific subject.

On some occassions you may need to create a highly specific agent with a filter that will not be reused in other agents.  In this case, you can write the fitler directly into the agent.  You do not need to create a list.

It is also possible to create an agent that does not have a filter.  This is a good strategy for agents that are tracking a small number of very focused sources.  If I would like to pick up all the information that is published on a competitor's news feed, for example, I can track this source without a filter.  This will allow the Digimind agent to pick up every publication from this source.

 

Then you can test the filter to check that the fitler syntax is correct.  Digimind will very quickly run the fitler as a query to check that you have not made any mistakes with operators or query syntax.  You may or may not see examples of news displayed in the box below.  This is not a problem at this stage.  You need to check that there are no syntax errors, and correct them.

Good syntax	Needs to be corrected

Once the syntax is fine, you can click to validate or save the filter.  This will take you back to the agent page.  You can now see the fitler has been added.  The filter icon has changed from black and is now blue.

 

Adding sources to an agent

When it comes to adding sources to an agent, you will have a more or less clear idea of where to find the information you need.

Fortunately, with Digimind you have a solution for these three cases.

I know exactly where to find the information: add a custom source to an agent

Let's imagine that I have a particular RSS feed, press title, blog, etc. that I would like this agent to track.  In this case, I need to go to the custom sources part of the monitoring and click on add a source.

In another tab of my internet browser, I can open my source and then copy the URL at the top:

 

I then paste this URL into the add feed page, click review and let Digimind do the rest for me.

In this case, Digimind Intelligence has found three RSS feeds from the same URL.  I can use the preview buttons to select the ones I want to track, and then I can click on save.

Helpful Hints: adding specific sources to an agent

It is important to copy and paste the URL into the agent.  Digimind Intelligence is a piece of software.  As a result it sees parts of the URL that humans do not always see.

In my example I found three RSS feeds on the same page.  You may find only one, many more or no feeds at all.  Digimind may give you a message that a page has been found.  This indicates that it couldn't find an RSS or news feed on this URL.  You may need to dig into the site a little more to find the URL you really need.  If Digimind finds a page, this source will still be tracked and you will be alerted when any changes to the page have been made.  This could be useful if you would like to track a page that doesn't change often, but contains useful details nonetheless, for example a list of suppliers, customers, prices, board directors, etc..

 

I have a vague idea where to find the information: use the URL Store

The URL Store is a collection of over 100,000 news and RSS feeds.  It is a great way to quickly add sources to your agent.  Let's imagine that for my subject of American Express I would like to track what is being said in many different financial blogs, in English, from the United States and the United Kingdom.  But, I don't know the exact URLs for all of these sources, and in fact I don't know the names of these sources so they will be difficult to add without the URL Store.

Go to the Source packs part of the monitoring, and then click on add a source pack:

Inside the URL Store use the criteria on the left to select which type of sources you would like to track:

Helpful Hints: URL Store

You can make your choices based on the type of source, the subject the source covers, the language of the source and the country of the source.  To see more choices in each section click on More.

You can add as many packs of sources from the URL Store as you need.

 

I have no idea where to find the information I need: use search engines to track recently indexed information

Sometimes you just have no idea where the useful information could be, but you are sure it's somewhere on the internet.  In this case you can get Digimind Intelligence to track webpages that have recently been indexed by search engines.  This is really useful for  a very wide sourcing.

Go to the Queries section and click on add.  You will then be able to give Digimind the keywords you want to use to generate a flow of information.  This flow will be the articles most recently indexed on the search engine containing your word (or words).

The default setting is for Digimind to ask News and Web based search engines in either English or French (depending on the language settings for your own account on Digimind).

If you would like to interrogate a different set of search engines and track what they have recently indexed, click in the boxes (this will become active after you have added a keyword to create the information flow).

 

Helpful Hints: working with keyword sources

This is a very wide sourcing for an agent.  As a result, you may find that you need to have a more precise fitler for this kind of source than for a more specific and focused type of sourcing.

The search engines we plug into do not all use the same operators.  AND and OR are ok for them all, but NOT does not consistently work across all the search engines.  Some of them use AND NOT and some use NOT.  The best is to keep the keywords you use to create the feed relatively simple, knowing that your Digimind agent is working with a filter of its own.  This Digimind filter can be used to protect you from any superfluous information.

Using the News search engines will help you to track the latest news stories about your keywords.  This could be very useful for tracking your competitors press coverage for example.

Web will bring back other useful information, such as product reviews.

The search engines are:

News	Google News Yahoo! News Digimind Content Factory
Blogs	Google Blogs Twingly Blogs
Forums	Google Groups Board Reader
Patents	EspaceNet USSPTO
Web	Google Web Yahoo! Web
Twitter	Twitter
Facebook	Facebook (public posts only)
Video	Daily Motion Youtube

Success! - You have created a monitoring agent, added a filter and added some sources.

What's next?

You may need to create furher monitoring agents in order to fully cover the information needs you have.  In which case, you can set up more agents, add queries and sources.

You will certainly be interested in seeing what you agent brings back to you.  You will see the alerts from your agent in two places: My Reader and also on a dashboard (click on the link to find out more).