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2. Overall description
This section will give an overview of the whole system. The system will be explained in its context to show how the system interacts with other systems and introduce the basic functionality of it. It will also describe the users that will use the system and how the system serves its purpose with its working. At last, the constraints and assumptions for the system will be presented.
The system consists of a mobile based news application. The application that will shows current and recent news from all over the world and through various news sources. It will show users live news feed from various news sources and also based on user’s choices.
The news application is powered by an automated system (a python scraper) that scrapes articles/data from various news sources. So, the scrapper provides the database server with news news articles and data from various sources at a given interval for 24x7.
Now, based on the user’s request, we will need someplace to store the data. For that, a noSQL database will be used. The database server will hold all news articles and data related to that news article and will be ready to serve the news application. The news application will requests data from the database server and the server serves news data depending on the user's choice of news sources through its implemented API system. All of the database communication is server based and will go over the internet.
The server will also run a recommender system which will monitor the views and not interested input for each user. It will then use the data and with the recommendations algorithm to build a set of recommended news article for each user. The set will contain of news articles relevant to each user and will be based of the users viewing and dismissing activity.
With the application, the users will be able to read news from various sources. The response will be based on the criteria of their requests.
On the homepage, the news will be in the form of card view. The news articles will be arranged in a tabs format, and arranged according to the sources. You can further click on the article to expand and view the entire content.
In order to change the sources, the user can go to the settings option and edit the sources based on their choice or interest.
Apart from all the tabs for various news sources, all users will also have a trending and recommendation tab. The trending tab will contain news articles which are currently popular among the people. The recommendation tab will show news articles which are relevant to the user using the app. It will do this by monitoring the views and saves of the user and will run this data through the recommendation algorithm to regularly generate a set of latest recommended news.
The characteristics are very basic, the user interacts with the mobile application system, to view/read the news as described above.
In order to edit/change the sources (that shows up on the home page), the user can just go to the settings option and do so based on the user’s preference.
The internet connection and the mobile operating system (minimum Android 5.0) are the only constraint for the application. Since, the application fetches data from the database over the internet, it is crucial that there is an active internet connection for the application to function. The operating system that we have designed the app now is for Android, so that is the only OS that can run our app for now.
Assumption about the product is that it will always be used on mobile phones that has enough performance. If the phone does not have enough hardware resources available for the application, for example the users might have allocated them with other applications, there may be scenarios where the application does not work as intended or even at all. The application is also dependent on the NewsPaper3k library for getting the links for the news articles so in case of any changes to NewsPaper3k API it may lead to disruption in the service which will require attention by the developers for continued service.
The recommended articles under the recommendation tab at first use will be the trending news and will provide the intended relevant content only after the user starts views or dismissing articles on the application
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