ADIS stands for Americas Digital Information System: an open source information monitoring and analysis powerhouse designed by the Joint Research Centre (JRC) over the course of more than a decade and modeled after the Europe Media Monitor. ADIS is the first result from the cooperation projects between the EU and OAS aimed at constituting a Virtual Situation Room.

ADIS is generated automatically by software algorithms without any human intervention and runs continuously refreshing every 10 minutes. ADIS collects around one hundred thousand new news articles every day, while individual users or user groups only want to see news feeds (RSS) about their own field of interest (a category or an alert). The category detection engine actually “reads” these thousands of articles for the interested user, and categorizes it with the appropriate tag into filtered RSS feeds for analysts to make sense of otherwise large amounts of data, much more efficiently and effectively. For example, it takes the system only a fraction of a second to conduct a category scan of over 30000 keywords against more than 1000 subjects. We currently have 95 working category definitions or alerts, and counting.

ADIS runs 24/7:

Scrapping: Systematically scanning all of OAS and JRCs’ growing database of digital sources – partnerships with subject-matter experts are key to identifying and validating new and relevant sources of information, so that ADIS knows where to look for signals.

Grabbing: Extracting and analyzing full text

Category Detection: Checking against multi-lingual lists of keywords, or combinations of keyword/concepts.



Note: the category definitions are used to tag incoming items only and cannot be applied retroactively. The categories are applied from the moment they are entered into the system. They are intended to be used when you know in advance what your area of interest is, and can act as an advanced filter for your picked issues. (E.g. Humanitarian Aid, Political Unrest, Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, Food Poisoning…)

Users can browse a selection of ADIS alerts at adis.oas.org; subscribe to alert RSS relevant to an issue being monitored; analyze the flow of articles within ADIS NewsDesk (define and explore alerts, revise sources, create collaborative newsletters, send e-mails and SMS to inform and report to stakeholders); feed relevant alert RSS into research matrixes, appending a new line every time a new entry meeting specific category definition requirements is detected; or read them with their preferred RSS reader (including adis.oas.org).

ADIS future features: As part of an Early Warning System, ADIS category detection and alert system for RSS monitoring is a basic building block. As ADIS continues to develop, some of the Early Warning capabilities become more apparent.