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Welcome to the ECA wiki! The ECA system 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 an extension to Python. 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). Python functions can be decorated with event and condition clauses. The event triggers the associated Python function. Each such function / rule 'fires' if its condition is met. If it fires, it executes the body of the function (the actions). Actions may dynamically update the visualization or produce a new (possibly user-defined) event that may trigger new sets of rules.

Prerequisites: Python 3.3. Recent FireFox has been tested. Other browsers (Chrome, Safari Internet Explorer) have not been tested yet, but should work as well. Internet Explorer does not work. For more details, see Installation instructions.