9.16.2. Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT)

This directory provides GDELT GeoMesa ingest commands and converter configuration files.

GDELT Event Database periodically scans news articles and uses natural language processing to identify “the people, locations, organizations, counts, themes, sources, emotions, quotes and events driving our global society every second of every day.”

GDELT data is updated each morning at 6am.

9.16.2.1. Getting GDELT data

GDELT has two different formats, the original 1.0 and the new 2.0 format. See the GDELT documentation, for more information. GeoMesa provides simple feature types and converters for both, named gdelt and gdelt2, respectively.

The GDELT data set can be downloaded using the provided download-data.sh script in $GEOMESA_ACCUMULO_HOME/bin/ as such

./download-data.sh gdelt

Alternatively, download the GDELT from the GDELT events page, select the zip file for the desired day, then unzip this in a convenient directory. This will result in a single CSV file.

Be aware that these files are actually tab-delimited, but are given the CSV extension for compatibility purposes. For this reason, be careful when modifying and saving these files in software like Excel as commas may be automatically inserted, breaking ingest functionality due to records like “Baltimore, Maryland”.

For more information on features of the GDELT data, see their documentation here.

9.16.2.2. Ingest Commands

Check that the gdelt and gdelt2 simple feature types are available on the GeoMesa tools classpath. This is the default case.

$ geomesa-accumulo env | grep gdelt

If it is not, merge the contents of reference.conf to $GEOMESA_ACCUMULO_HOME/conf/application.conf, or ensure that reference.conf is in $GEOMESA_ACCUMULO_HOME/conf/sfts/gdelt.

Run the ingest. You may optionally point to a different accumulo instance using -i and -z options. See geomesa-accumulo help ingest for more detail.

$ geomesa-accumulo ingest -u USERNAME -c CATALOGNAME -s gdelt -C gdelt gdelt_data.csv

Any errors in ingestion will be logged to $GEOMESA_ACCUMULO_HOME/logs.