The Tributary

Tributary Web Interface
The Tributary Logo

Inspiration

We found that modern news aggregators failed to represent the totality of the world's events. This leaves many feeling uninformed as our news sources are largely centralized towards our own nations. We wanted a way to make the World's news more accessible to everyone.

What it does

The Tributary maps and aggregates world news onto the platform that most accurately reflects the world - a world map. Users see a heatmap projected over this map revealing the news in different regions across the globe. Upon clicking on a region of this heatmap, users are shown a selection of articles for that region. The idea and the execution were both conceptualized and performed this weekend.

How we built it

We did this by starting off with a python script that queries Google News for relevant headlines across the world based on category. Once the list of the articles is received, our custom script scans through the metadata of each article and formats information about the article into a JSON object. It then places a POST request through our custom RESTful Tributary API. This pushes an article onto our server's MongoDB database. Now, through our HTML, CSS, and JS-powered website, it can be placed onto the World's Eye View.

Challenges we ran into

We struggled with finding out the optimal implementation for our front end and with parsing data from various news sources into a readable and semantic format. Another challenge we encountered was handling the interoperability and interchange of data between different sources. We resolved this challenge through the implementation of our universal Tributary API. Our final challenge was isolating keywords from articles in order to separate them by content type and gather analytics. We resolved this through the use of natural language processing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of the finalized design and user experience of our website. Furthermore, we're excited about our backend functionality in regards to parsing and uploading large amounts of data into our database in a highly standardized format.

What we learned

We learned the intricacies of web scraping, how to analyze large swaths of text through natural language processing, and how to display data in intuitive and unique formats.

What's next for The Tributary

While our current website is fully mobile responsive, we plan on implementing a mobile application for iOS and Android that streamlines and enhances our existing user experience. Such an application could open the door for user-targetted articles and more customizability.