In my last post I walked through grabbing tweets from Twitter using their API. We then took those tweets and built the necessary XML “resource” for pushing that data into Saffron Sierra. In this post I’m going to cover the process of actually getting the data into (observing) Sierra.

To start, I should probably cover a minor modification I made to the code from the last post as I worked through this post. Last time, I created one XML resource for Sierra that contained all of the tweets from my timeline. After some testing, and thinking, I decided to put each tweet into it’s own separate XML resource. I think this is cleaner, and it’s the “supported” path for Sierra anyway.

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As we look to build compelling examples using Saffron Sierra we’ve often talked about using Twitter as a datasource.  If we could get Twitter data/tweets into Sierra then we could builds lots on interesting analytical capability using Sierra’s APIs.  To enable our exploration, and others, I’ve decided to start a little series (probably 3 parts) of blog post about observing and querying Twitter data in Sierra.

In this first part I’m going to cover the process of grabbing a Twitter feed and building the necessary resource XML for Sierra observations.  For now, you can think of a “resource” in Sierra speak as our method of “inserting” data into the system.  For my example I’m going to be using Groovy .  This code should be easily replicated in your language of choice.  I choose Groovy because I’m familiar with it and it provides a few tools that make this kind of stuff really easy.

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