Getting Started with Unlock Text
Unlock Text is a RESTful API, you can use it by first setting up a username and password using the POST operation. You can use the GET operation to find out information about this account such as the number of Text documents that have been parsed. POST and GET operations can be used to set up new documents to be parsed and to retrieve the urls of results pages created by the parser.
You will need to use cURL commands; or a REST Console or Client which are available as add ons for Chrome and Firefox web browsers, to use Unlock Text.
The process works as follows:
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STEP 1: Create an Account
To be able to use Unlock Text you need to set up an account. This is done using the same commands as using the service. For more details see the following section of the API Documentation page:
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STEP 2: Make the text you want to parse available on the web
The text you want to parse may be a website already so just link to the html page. If you have a document you want to parse, save it as plain text and host it on a webserver as a .txt file.
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STEP 3: POST the uri of the text or website to Unlock Text
The Geoparser will work on the text and then send a list of potential locations to the Unlock Places service. This will attach the location information to the places. The results are then outputted to the web server in three formats XML, JSON and KML. You can post more than one document at a time and they will be parsed in batches. See the following sections of the API Documentation for more information:
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STEP 4: GET the output's uri
The output for each document posted can be accessed via the web and used in an application, web map or analysis. For more information about retrieving the data see the following sections of the API Documentation:
Full documentation for each step and setting up an account can is available in the API Documentation.
