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From Gnosis Arts

Contents 1 Application 2 Data Included 3 The Process: How It Works 4 Full Demonstration

Application

Gnosify™ is our submission to the 2011-2012 NYC BigApps 3.0 Challenge. This particular instantiation of Gnosify™ is an SMS application that sends updates to opt-in users via text message of new events happening in New York. However, Gnosify™ is both extensible and versatile. Its power and novelty come from the fact that it can turn any structured data feed - RSS, Atom, XML, etc. - into an automated text message alert system. (Just research it! You'll find that there is no app out there that does this, as it requires some very sophisticated coding to accomplish! ;)

Or, you could use Gnosify™ in a manual fashion, to manually update opt-in users on anything you would like. A city update; an emergency broadcast; a new Broadway Show; a police blotter; weather reports; anything the City needed to updated residents on, Gnosify™ can accomplish this.

Data Included

Current datasets that this demonstration instantiation of the app uses are:

• Broadway Shows
• Brooklyn Public Library Events
• NYC Parks and Recreation Events
• New York Public Library Events

Datasets were taken from NYC Open Data datasets. We utilized several of the datasets included here.

Additional datasets - or even totally different datasets - could be used. Any dataset that can be translated into either RSS or XML format can be utilized by this app, giving it tremendous flexibility.

Gnosify™ also works very well with Twitter. As both Twitter status updates and Twitter Search are based on XML/RSS feeds, these feeds could easily be turned into a text message alert, using Gnosify™.

This particular version of Gnosify™ utilizes a combination of scripts including

• The Twitter API
• The Tropo SMS API
• Our Own PHP XML parsing script to request and send data
• Windows Task Scheduler for Windows 7

The Process: How It Works

1. We created a PHP script that basically sends the latest item in the RSS feed to the SMS API.

. . . <?php $xml_file = "http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/events_in_nyc.rss?count=1"; // OPEN XML FILE ###################################################### if(!$xml=simplexml_load_file($xml_file)){ trigger_error('Error reading XML file',E_USER_ERROR); } // READING FROM XML FILE ############################################## // LOOP CONTENTS echo("<h1>Reading Latest Twitter Status Update from @events_in_nyc</h1>"); foreach ($xml->channel->item as $key){ $title = $key->{"title"}; } ?> . . . The file has 3 main elements:

• A Javascript function to automatically submit form values
• A Simplexml_load_file PHP function which gets the data from the Twitter RSS file and parses the requisite variable
• An HTML form that auto-populates a form field with the RSS element data we want to send to SMS

2. The PHP file submits the form to the Tropo API which initiates the SMS alert. The value submitted by the PHP form corresponding to the RSS data becomes the message submitted to the opt-in phone number in the Tropo application.

. . . answer(); call('+1' + numbertodial, { network:"SMS"}); say(msg);say("To stop receiving these alerts, send an email to developers@gnosisarts.com (this number does not accept incoming texts)."); hangup(); . . .

3. We use Windows Task Scheduler on an additional server and schedule it to call the PHP file once per day (or as often as we like). This could also be done server side with a cronjob. However, some webhosts (e.g., ours!) do not allow cron jobs so Windows Task Scheduler was a workaround.

Full Demonstration

Complete the form below to receive automated text message alerts from Gnosify™. This is the full demo and once you signup, you will start to receive the text message updates within 24-48 hours. You will receive an email once you are ready to start receiving text messages.