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Welcome to the ECA rule engine wiki! The ECA rule engine (ECARE) can be used to analyze a Twitter message stream and to create a visualization of the analysis results in a browser. All of this in real-time, so you would see, for example, a word cloud or tweet frequency graph dynamically changing with incoming tweets. We call this a Twitter dashboard, or TweetBoard for short.

The ECA language is a dedicated language which you specify your analysis algorithms, your visualization design and with which you dynamically control the visualization. ECA stands for Event-Condition-Action; it is a concept derived from rule-based expert systems. The idea is that the incoming message stream generates events (such as a "new_tweet" event per incoming message). An event triggers the associated ECA rule(s). Each such rule 'fires' if its condition is met. If it fires, it executes the specified actions. Actions may dynamically update the visualization or produce new (possibly user-defined) event that may trigger new sets of rules.

Prerequisites: Python 3.3. Recent FireFox, Chrome, Safari browser (ECARE does not work correctly with Internet Explorer). For more details, see Installation instructions.

Getting started

1. Installation instructions

2. Development and execution with the development user-interface (DUI)

3. Development and execution with the command-line interface (noDUI)

4. Testing and debugging

5. Known problems

User Manual

1. The ECA Language

2. Creating Visualizations

Reference Manual

1. The ECA specification language

2. Events

3. Actions

4. Expressions

5. Functions and Modules

6. Writing your own module

7. Gadgets

8. Architecture