SwiftRiver is an open source intelligence gathering platform for managing realtime streams of data. Today we’re happy to announce the relaunch of SwiftRiver at Swiftly.org and to release of our first app built on the SwiftRiver platform, simply called Sweeper App.

SwiftRiver | Sweeper

SwiftRiver is unique in that there is no singular ‘SwiftRiver’ application. Rather, there are many, that combine plugins, APIs and themes in different ways that are optimized for different workflows. If you’re a journalist researching different subjects you’ll probably use a different Swift App than say a crisis response organization. There are more Apps coming, Sweeper is just the first and it was specifically designed to optimize the workflow of Ushahidi users.

A Bit About the Technology

For the UI, we’re using the Kohana MVC, but our underlying technology operates completely independent from Kohana and can work with any programming language. That ‘core’ is SwiftRiver. Anything using the core is an App and any external service we rely upon is called an API.

Sweeper App

This first app, called the Sweeper is the first project to enter Beta and now ships with SwiftRiver.

Sweeper, is a term Ushahidi uses to refer to people who ‘sweep’ through a system, performing certain tasks. During the Haiti earthquakes, volunteer sweepers were used to verify and geolocate some 100,000 reports that had been crowdsourced about the catastrophe. Thus, this application is designed for speed and ease of use with big easy to read text, bright buttons and a very clean layout.

SwiftWebServices (SWS)

SwiftWebServices is our API platform. These APIs power Swift and the various apps built for it, but they can also power any application. PubHealth.org for instance is using SWS to power a public health news aggregator. Others might use them to power different applications or programs. You can find out more about our APIs and pricing here.

Download v.0.5.0

You can find out more about the team behind SwiftRiver here.