Content Selection & Discovery System (CSDS) ECR

Hi, everyone. This is the very early draft of the CSDS. Nothing is set in stone, so please feel free post any and all your suggestions. The draft doesn’t go into implementation details. For suggestions regarding implementation, please start a new topic in this section except when it directly influences what’s covered here.

Sources of requests (see below for info on what requests are) are examples. There will probably be many different ones once the system is operational. Please don’t post suggestions about those, though, except when it may affect the design of this system. I’ll start another thread on that topic at a later date.

To get one thing out of the way before we go in-depth, Syed Karim is our BDFL and the final judgement of what goes in and what doesn’t rests with him. :wink:

Status

Early community review

Changelog

  • 2014-03-17: first draft

Overview

Outernet Content Selection and Discovery System (CSDS), a.k.a. Dream-catcher, is one of two key user-facing systems, the other being the Outernet client software.

On of the primary purposes of CSDS is handling requests for content. It collects requests for content from end users, and allows the community to suggest content based on such requests. CSDS interfaces with content packaging system (CPS) on the other end, providing a stream of content (content pool) based on suggestions and votes from community members.

CSDS can be roughly split into following major functional units:

  • Request hub interface
  • Content discovery subsystem
  • Content selection subsystem
  • Content pool interface

Terms and definitions

This section contains a short list of terms terms used in this document, and definitions of those terms.

Content

Content refers to Internet resource that can be read, viewed, watched, or heard, such as HTML pages, video and audio recordings, animation, documents, etc.

Processed content

Processed content is content prepared for broadcast.

End user

End user refers to a group of users that directly consume content broadcast by the Outernet network.

Contributor

Contributor is a user that does not necessarily directly consume the content broadcasts, but seeks to aid in selection, transcription, and other tasks that enable Outernet to prepare and broadcast the content.

(Outernet) community

Collective name for end users and contributors.

(Content) request

Sent to CSDS by the end users. It is (or should be) a description of content end user want to have broadcast on the network, rather than concrete items on the web.

Requester

User making a content request.

Request type

The type of the request medium. Broadly divided into transcribed and nontranscribed.

Request format

The request subtype. Transcribed requests are always text, while non-transcribed can be image or audio (and other non-text formats).

Request content (request payload)

The content of the request (without any metadata).

Request content language

Language in which the request content is written.

Request(ed) language

Language of the content being requested (as opposed to request content language).

Request topic

A topic for which the content is being requested (e.g., agriculture, maths, medicine, sports).

Request world

There are two request worlds: online and offline. Requests coming from the Internet are considered online, while requests coming from non-Internet sources (phones, SMS, snail mail) are considered offline.

Transcribed (content) request (TR)

Requests that were put in written form.

Nontranscribed (content) request (NTR)

Nontranscribed requests are request sent in format other than text.

Native request

Request whose request content language is not English. The term is a bit misleading when speaking of end users whose native language is English, but we use this term to differentiate between requests that might need translation into English and those that don’t, and because it’s shorter than “non-English request”. It should also not be confused with native content requests (see native content request).

Native content request (NCR)

Request for content in native language of the requester.

(Request) source

Channel through which request was sent.

Request hub (RH)

A component that processes each request regardless of the source.

Request (hub) adaptor (RA)

Software component that gathers or receives requests, and converts them to a format that RH can process.

On-site RA

RA that is built into the RH. These are usually components developed by Outernet staff, or contributed components that were accepted to run as part of the RH.

Third-party RA

RA that uses the RH’s REST API to provide data. These are usually developed by third parties.

Trusted RA

A RA that is considered to provide reliable data.

Untrusted RA

A RA that is not considered to provide reliable data. This is not only limited to unregistered third-party integrations, but also to sources that lack the capacity to provide verifiable information about requests.

Request processing

Process of adapting requests for further processing by human.

Clean requests

Requests that are complete after processing.

(Edit) approval queue

Requests edits waiting for approval by community members.

Request queue manager (RQM)

Manages the request queue by providing sorted and prioritized lists, and removing obsolete information.

Content discovery

Process of finding appropriate content for broadcast on Outernet.

Content discovery subsystem (CDS)

A component of the CSDS that facilitates content discovery.

Content selection

The process in which content that should be broadcast is selected from the pool of suggestions.

Content selection subsystem (CSS)

Part of CSDS that facilitates content selection.

(Request) edits

Any of the proofing, transcription or translation activities performed on requests. Edits do not directly overwrite the original request, but are subject to approval by community members.

Approval score (APS)

Score that indicates the level of success in editing request metadata or content.

Acceptance score (ACS)

Score that indicates the level of acceptance of submitted content.

Voting (power) score (VPS)

A score user is assigned based on various factors. Voting score determine the strength of a vote during content selection.

Content pool

Collection of content that are selected for the playlist.

Playlist

A selection of content that will be broadcast. This is a filtered list of content from the content pool. The filtering removes content that cannot be broadcast for any reason.

Figures

Fig1: Outernet CSDS

Community membership

All users that would like to participate in the Outernet community are expected to register a user account. During registration, they provide the following information:

  • email address
  • full name
  • country
  • languages they can read and write (with proficiency level? TBD)
  • topics that interest them (selected from a predefined list, TBD)

The provided data is used to match various tasks to their abilities and interests (for example, translation verification requests may only go to users that claim to know the source language).

Request hub interface

The requests come from a number of different sources. These may include Facebook USSD, Facebook 0, Mixit, as well as more conventional channels such as the CSDS web application, SMS, and email.

Requests can also be non-transcribed, transcribed, English-language or native (non-English).

Request adaptors

The RAs are components that represent the first contact with requests. They may be passive or active. Passive adaptors react to incoming communication. Examples are SMS adaptors or voice inbox adaptors. Active adaptors seek out requests on the channel they are assigned to performing data mining and similar operations on the source. Examples of the latter may include Facebook or Twitter adaptors.

While each adaptor has a different implementation suited to its particular source, it will communicate with the RH using the common RH API.

Each RA will need to provide the RH the following information:

  • Time request was made
  • Location information (country) made available by the source
  • Request world (online, offline)
  • Request format (text, image, video)
  • Request language
  • Requested content language
  • Request topics
  • Request content

The request content may either be Unicode text (UTF-8) or base64-encoded binary data.

RAs generally do not modify the request content except for removal of unnecessary metadata depending on the source. RAs may strip personal information from requests, for example, or metadata in images and audio files.

All RAs are divided into on-site and third-party adaptors.

On-site adaptors

On-site RAs run as part of the RH and use the internal API directly. They use the same stack as the RH and possibly operate on the same server(s). This may provide better performance due to the lack of network latency and direct access to the request database. It should be noted that on-site RAs are not necessarily developed by the Outernet project members. They may be contributed third parties.

Third-party adaptors

Third-party RAs are developed by third parties and use the RH’s REST API to send data. They are somewhat slower due to network latency, but are not restricted by the RH’s stack requirements. They have no direct access to the RH database, but may obtain information through the REST API.

Request hub

The purpose of the request hub (RH) is to label and persist incoming requests. This allows rating, sorting, and display of requests to the users.

RH provides a public REST API to all RAs.

Because the RAs are expected to provide unverifiable but important information, RH makes a distinction between trusted and untrusted RAs. Each request gets flagged accordingly. The decision to trust an RA should be based on the quality of its implementation as well as the data it sends, and the community will participate in the decision (but the actual workflow is still TBD).

RH will also filter out any requests that are duplicates, possibly augmenting existing requests with additional metadata.

Complete requests are flagged appropriately.

Regardless of whether requests come from trusted or untrusted sources, the RH’s job is to thoroughly clean any incoming data if needed. (We’ll probably know more about this requirement when we start detailing the RAs implementations).

The next step in request processing is to split incoming requests into two main buckets: transcribed and nontranscribed. This is done based on the information provided by the RA. The request is also tagged with data about the format.

Request are then tagged for language of the request and language of the request content.

Finally, the content is decoded (if necessary), and persisted in the database along with the metadata.

Request queue manager

The main job of the request queue manager (RQM) is to provide prioritized and sorted lists of partial requests, and providing interfaces for editing them. RQM’s secondary, non-essential, purpose is cleanup of obsolete requests on daily basis.

In order to compile the queues, RQM will employ different algorithms for sorting them.

The RQM is used by the web interface and API clients to obtain sorted lists of requests. The RQM provides three review queues:

  • proofing queue
  • transcription queue
  • translation queue

Activities performed on requests in any of the three review queues are collectively called request edits (or just edits).

There is a fourth queue, the approval queue, which takes edited requests from the review queues and makes them available for approval by other community members.

Proofing queue

The proofing queue contains reverse-chronological list of all requests that were flagged as incomplete or untrusted by the RH. Community members may review the items and provide additional data about them or edit existing data. Such data may include topics and language of the requests. Community member can also mark the whole request for removal when proofing.

Transcription queue

Transcription queue contains NTRs that needs the help from community in order to convert them into TRs. Requests that have language- and/or topic-related metadata that match the languages listed in user’s profile will be highlighted.

Translation queue

Translation queues contain TRs that need to be translated into English. As with transcription queue, requests that have language- and/or topic-related metadata will be highlighted depending on user’s profile information.

Approval queue

Requests that have been manually edited by the community are persisted in the approval database, and await approval or rejection by the community member.

All requests that have gone through the queues are marked as processed.

Request edit approvals

Any edits must be approved by other community members in order to be accepted into the main request queue. The requests pending approval are compiled into a separate queue by the RQM and are made available to the community members for review.

There are two possible actions: approve and reject. By default three unique approvals or rejections are required for the edits to be accepted or rejected.

Approved edits will also be reviewed by RQM for completeness, and the complete flag will be set accordingly on the original request after it is updated. Requests that are incomplete after the edits are made will show up in the review queues again.

Approval score

Each community member has an editor score. The editor score increases by 1 for each approved edit, and is reduced by 1 for each rejected edit. As the approval score of the editor grows, they will require less votes for approval, and negative approval score requires less votes for rejections. With a rejection score below a certain threshold (TBD), the editor permanently loses the ability to edit. Editing capability may be restored by contacting the Outernet staff with an appropriate explanation of the situation.

Content discovery subsystem

The content discovery subsystem (CDS) provides interfaces for suggesting content that should be broadcast through the Outernet network.

The suggestions are divided into two main categories:

  • suggestions for requested content
  • general suggestions

The request queue interface allows users to review requests and suggest appropriate content. The general suggestion interface allows users to submit content regardless of the requests in the queue. Both interfaces are provided as web UIs and REST APIs.

CDS will persist all incoming suggestions in a database.

Request queue interface

The request queue interface provides a sorted list of requests and means for users to provide content suggestions for each request in the queue.

Requests are prioritized based on metadata provided by the RH and community members through RQM. The factors that might influence the sorting order are (in no particular order, and still TBD):

  • timestamp of the request
  • locale (language and/or location)
  • type of source and/or RA

The interface shows different requests to community members based on the topics listed under the members’ accounts. Each list is personalized to the particular area of expertise of the user.

General suggestion interface

The general suggestion interface can be used by community members (as well as end users) to provide suggestions for concrete content that may or may not have been requested by any of the end users.

Suggestion format

Suggestions may be single-page or multipage. Single-page content are just a single URL, whereas multipage may comprise of multiple URLs or a single URL with crawl depth. The term ‘page’ is used loosely here to refer to both textual and non-textual content (images, audio, video).

Each suggestion provides at least the following data:

  • URL(s) of the content
  • type of content (single-page, multi-page)
  • crawl depth

To help community with content selection, following information may also be added:

  • primary subject (a list of topics may be provided)
  • tags

Supplementary information

The CDS may also try to fetch the suggested content to verify its availability, and determine the payload size, and anything else that may be relevant. Based on the information gathered at this stage, CSD may mark or discard invalid content.

Content Selection Subsystem

The selection subsystem provides interfaces for community voting. All open suggestions that have not been broadcast, that are newer than a week become candidates for voting.

Apart from simply stating whether content should or should not appear in the broadcast data, community members also provide suggestions for how long the content should be on air (method of selection TBD).

Voting and voting scores

Each community member starts with 10 votes. They can choose how to spend the votes. They may use all votes on a single piece of content, or may spread them across multiple pieces. For each piece of content user voted for, which is subsequently broadcast, they are permanently awarded 1 additional vote that can be used in future.

Votes are cast every week, and content pool is updated on weekly basis. After each week, voting scores are reset to their base values.

Content pool interface

The content pool is a collection of content that may become part of the daily playlist. The pool is updated once a week based on the votes that were cast during the previous week.

Selection of broadcast content from the content pool is done semi-automatically by the Playlist creation system which is not part of CSDS. The content pool interface simply lists all available content.

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Thank you Mr. Syed Karim for your efforts also your great team work efforts.