Demo OpenWhisk.

Scenario

A political researcher is interested in analysing political speeches to understand the personality that is being projected by the politician.

The researcher has a NoSQL database where the speeches are being stored and wants to use Watson Personality Insights service from Bluemix to analyse the speech. As a researcher, there are limited funds for this work and infrastructure cannot be purchased. Cloud is an obvious deployment target. However, the rate that speeches are added to the database is very low and the researcher does not want to pay for idle cloud resources. The analysis process should only run when a new speech is added.

Solution

• Cloudant NoSQL to store the speeches
• Watson Developer Cloud Personality Insights
• OpenWhisk to trigger events from Cloundant NoSQL and activate actions to analyse the speech.

Implementation

Prerequisites

• IBM Bluemix account. Sign up for Bluemix, or use an existing account.

• IBM Bluemix OpenWhisk early access. Sign up for Bluemix OpenWhisk.

• Install and configure the OpenWhisk command line interface Set up OpenWhisk CLI.

• Clone this repository

  $ git clone https://github.com/iwinoto/openwhisk-demo-personalityanalysis.git

• From a command line terminal, navigate to the cloned repository directory

Bluemix web console

OpenWhisk is currently only available in the Bluemix Public US-South region. When you login to the Bluemix web console, make sure you are in the US South region.

Create an instance of Personality Insights service

1. From the Bluemix web console main navigation menu, select the Watson category.

• Click on + in the hexagon on the top right of the main panel
• From the Watson category, select Personality Insights.
• At the bottom right of the Personality Insights page, select Create to create an instance of the service.
• In the service overview page, select Service credentials
• Make a note of the username and password values. You will need to set this in the action_analyse.js action script.

Create a CloudantNoSQL instance

1. From the Bluemix web console main navigation menu, select the Data & Analytics category.

• Click on + in the hexagon on the top right of the main panel
• From the Data & Analytics category, select Cloudant NoSQL DB.
• At the bottom right of the Cloudant NoSQL DB page, select Create to create an instance of the service.
• In the service Manage page, select Launch to launch the Cloudant web console
• Create a database called speeches.

OpenWhisk web console

The Bluemix web console includes a console for OpenWhisk. You can use the OpenWhisk console to create resources and to view the output of OpenWhisk triggers and actions. During this exercise you will be working in the terminal control resources but you will use the web console Dashboard to view the results.

To open the OpenWhisk console, from the Bluemix console open the menu and select Apps then select OpenWhisk.

Click on Develop to open the OpenWhisk development environment.

Create create the actions

We need two actions. The analyse action will send a request to the Personality Insights service to create a personality profile from some text. The changeListener action will check the changes to the database and ignore database deletions.

These steps are performed in the terminal.

1. Update the ./serverless/action_analyse.js code with the username and password values from your Personality Insights service

var personality_insights = watson.personality_insights({
  username: '<Your username>',
  password: '<Your password>',
  version: 'v2'
});

2. create an action to call the Personality Insights service

wsk action create analyse serverless/action_analyse.js

3. test action with some sample text. The service will return with a message that there is not enough text to create a profile. That's OK for now, we just want to know that the service is being called.

wsk action invoke -p text "this is some text to analyse" -p language en -b -r analyse

Use wsk action invoke -h to understand the command parameters. You will see the results of invoking the action in the command line and in the OpenWhisk web console Dashboard. 4. Create the speechListener action which will fire the newSpeech trigger

wsk action create -p namespace <Your OpenWhisk namespace> speechListener serverless/feed_newDoc.js

The namespace is set as a default parameter to the action so it fire the right trigger. Examine the code serverless/feed_newDoc.js to see how its used.

Create a trigger when a new document is added to Cloudant NoSQL

Now we have the actions we need to create triggers which represent events.

1. Make sure your OpenWhisk CLI is in the namespace corresponding to the Bluemix organization and space where your Cloudant NoSQL service instance is created. This will have been set up if you followed the Install and configure OpenWhisk CLI step.

wsk property get --namespace

• To change the namespace, use the following command

  wsk property set --namespace <myBluemixOrg>_<myBluemixSpace>

2. Refresh the whisk packages in your namespace. The refresh automatically creates a package binding for the Cloudant service instance that you created.

$ wsk package refresh
$ wsk package list

The result of the last command should show the fully qualified name of the package binding corresponding to the Cloudant NoSQL service instance. It will bein the format of <Your OpenWhisk namespace>/<Your Cloudant NoSQL binding>. You will need this in the next step. 3. create trigger on the speeches database

wsk trigger create changedSpeech --feed /<Your OpenWhisk namespace>/<Your Cloudant NoSQL binding>/changes --param dbname speeches --param includeDoc true

This trigger will be fired whenever there is a change in the speeches database.

The changeListener action will invoke a trigger named 'newSpeech' when the database change is not a deletion. We need to configure the trigger in OpenWhisk.

1. Create the newSpeech trigger.

wsk trigger create newSpeech --feed speechListener

Create the rules.

Now that the actions and triggers have been created, we create rules that link the triggers to actions.

The analyse action will be fired when a new speech is detected. We create a rule to invoke the analyse action whenever the newSpeech trigger is fired.

1. Create a rule that invokes the analyse action when the newSpeech trigger is fired

wsk rule create --enable newSpeechRule newSpeech analyse

2. Test the rule by firing the trigger from the command line with parameters that will be passed to the action.

wsk trigger fire newSpeech -p text "here is some text to analyse" -p language en

3. Inspect the result in the dashboard or list activations and get the activation result

The changeListener action will be fired when a change to the speeches database is detected. We create a rule to invoke the changeListener action whenever the changedSpeech trigger is fired.

1. Create a rule that invokes the speechListener action when the changedSpeech trigger is fired

wsk rule create --enable changedSpeechRule changedSpeech speechListener

2. Test the rule by firing the trigger from the command line

wsk trigger fire changedSpeech -p text "here is some text to analyse" -p language en

Firing the changedSpeech trigger will invoke changeListener action which will invoke the newSpeech trigger which will finally invoke the analyse action.

Test the system.

Now when we add a new document to the speeches database, we should see the actions being invoked and get a personality analysis of the speech.

1. In the Cloudant NoSQL console, add a new document using the JSON in ./sampleText as a template.

• View the results in the OpenWhisk web console Dashboard.