Obserbot: A Totally Automated Watcher to Monitor Essential Services

“Obserbot” is the name of a long term project resulting from the crasis of the terms “observe” and “bot” (abridged form for robot). In fact it represents a framework to monitor internet and extract some knowledge without any human supervision. The service is available 24 h a day and 365 days a year. Obserbot targets are presently two: official news media and twitter. A rough mass of textual data are collected form those two sources. A in-line semantic analysis of the collected stream allows to extract information of a specific Domain of Interest (DoI). The hardware and software architecture allowing collection is rather versatile and can be employed for several different purposes, however the semantic analytics is strictly DoI dependent. In its present form, Obserbot can handle information related to all essential services. Essential services are those activities performed by network of utilities that allow good provision: water supply, energy supply (e.g. gas and electricity), fuel supply, fresh food supply etc. and responding to other fundamental human needs such as transports, mobility and social connectivity.