(Level: BEGINNER)
Seasons Greetings!
This is Day #1 of a short series of brief tips, tricks, hints, and reminders of information relating to the Apama Streaming Analytics platform, both from Software AG as well as from the community.
Since we’re at Day #1, let’s start with some basics of where to find documentation relating to Apama:
If you are using Apama within the Cumulocity IoT platform, then you can find addition information relating to the microservice and the Streaming Analytics web application below:
In the coming days we’ll be picking out specific topics of interest, at time referring to information within the above documentation sites, or reminding you of blog posts.
Note: This series of articles will be published Monday-Friday only, with the occasional weekend bonus.
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Hi Kevin,
Love the Advent theme for your posts. Would love to know what are the Advent traditions in your house? Do you have a wreath?
Here is mine from last year, didn’t get around to do one this year yet, but may be this post will get me off my butt 
As it is the first week of Advent, only one candle is lit.
Now from your link I learn, that Apama helps us make the most of real-time data insights with streaming analytics.
Can you do a Twitter or Instagram query of all the posts that have the word advent and or wreath in it and plot out how many candles are lit? Would be so cool to see how it goes up over time when we are getting closer to Christmas day.
I would be super pleasantly surprised if that is possible. Crossing fingers, Mark.
Hi Mark,
Great to hear from you and thankyou for responding.
In our house we will have wreath on the front door, without weekly candles, and a single candle with numbers down it that it lit each day for a short while. We also have advent calendars for family members, normally with a small chocolate snack each day.
As for your question – yes that would be technically feasible.
Monitoring a twitter feed is possible with Apama, and in fact we have both a blog post and a video recording showing that:
Apama Community Edition Getting Started Webinar
I expect that could be modified to first just react to the tweets containing the word “Advent”, and then to check if they contained an image.
The second part would be image analysis which is beyond the scope of Apama on its own (and not my area of expertise), but potentially could be done by training an ML model to look for candles (counting object in an image seems doable). You could operationalize that trained model for execution within Software AG’s Zementis (for Predictive Analytics) and have Apama pass the URLs of the images to Zementis, and then record the results to some service for storage and later historical viewing. I don’t plan to build it for you but it should be possible!
Once again, thanks for engaging, and I hope you enjoy the rest of the series.
Kev
a single candle with numbers down it that it lit each day for a short while
I am not familiar with these. Please share a picture.
Love that it is possible to track Tweets with “advent” in the text that also contain a picture. It sounds like that change is not very hard.
I think it would make your Advent series so much more interesting if you would create such a solution, that way you can then share an update every day, and folks could actually tweet a picture with a candle to be counted.
If you share your solution on Github others here in the community could pick up the code and add the ML component and make it a true community project, that everyone can easily follow.
Anyone else interested?
Hi Mark - I’ll be interested to see if anyone else in the community picks up the idea and runs with it, though I suspect the main posts will get more traction than the comments. Happy for people to start with the code from the webinar linked above.
BTW - you said you hadn’t see a numbered candle - here’s ours:
Have a great weekend,
Kev
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I like it and am surprised that I never knew about it. So I checked out Wikipedia:
An Advent candle is a candle marked with the days of December up to Christmas Eve. It is typically used in a household rather than a church setting: each day in December the candle is burnt down a little more, to the mark for the day, to show the passing of the days leading up to Christmas.[1] As with reusable Advent calendars, some Advent candles start marking the days from 1 December, rather than the exact beginning of Advent. Some households will make a Christmas decoration out of sprigs of evergreen and Christmas ornaments, with the candle at its centre; others will simply put it in a candlestick. It is usually burned at the family evening meal each day.
The custom of having an Advent candle seems to have started in Germany, …
Now I grew up in Germany and never stumbled upon it there and there is no Wikipedia entry for Adventskerze, actually it forwards to Adventskranz aka Advent Wreath
Still I actually love it. When you have smaller children and every day at supper you burn the candle a bit more and get closer to Christmas. Very lovely!
Thanks for sharing, Mark.
