Feeds

Accessing the API Feeds

The Reuters Spotlight provides access to the rich Reuters content seen on http://www.reuters.com via standards based feeds. To access the feeds an API Key is required - please see Getting Started for more details on obtaining an API key. For more details on how to use the API feeds please see the Using the API Feeds section in the Handbook

How to use the feeds

Feeds are provided via URLs and both the structure and parameters will determine the content and feed format returned. The feeds are broken into two types:

  • Content Feeds – These are the actual feeds of Reuters content; what is contained in these feeds will depend on the Content Type, Channel ID, and the Edition parameters passed in with each request. All content feeds have a base URL of:
    http://spotlight.reuters.com/api/feed
  • Information Feeds – These are the informational feeds (meta data) about the Content Feeds. They provide information such as the list of Content Feeds, Content Types, Editions. All Information Feeds have a base URL of:
    http://spotlight.reuters.com/api/service

Content Feed Explorer

The Content Feed Explorer provides an interface to help you easily build content feed URLs from the parameters available. This allows you to browse the feeds available as well as build the URLs you require for use within your projects. Please make sure you are logged in to Spotlight so that your API key will automatically be populated.

Content

Edition

Channel

Format
Count (optional)
Semantic
Callback (optional)
Version (optional)

Feed URL

You must be registered and logged in to obtain the feed URL.

 

Information Feed Explorer

Like the Content Feed Explorer, the Feed Information Explorer provides an interface to help you easily build the URLs for the meta data feeds from the parameters available.

Content Type

Edition

Channel

Feed Type

Format
Callback (optional)
Version (optional)

Feed URL

You must be registered and logged in to obtain the feed URL.

 

Feed Parameters

Following the base URL there are a number of parameters which will determine the content and format of the feed. There are five set parameters which are required to return a feed of Reuters content, these are:

edition (required) - The Edition represents the country web site that the Reuters content is sourced from e.g US, UK, Japan, India, China etc.

content (required) - The Content Type represents the type of content that will be contained in the feed e.g. Articles, News Text, Videos, Pictures etc.

channel (required for content) - The Channel represents the news channel content which the feed will contain e.g. Top News, Entertainment, Business. The channel parameter can be either a channel name or number depending on the content type. If the channel is omitted a feed of feeds is returned, in OPML, which will represent all the feeds available for the given Content Type, Edition and Format.

format (required) - The format of the feed e.g. Atom, RSS, Media RSS, JSON and Serialized PHP.

apikey (required) - Your unique API Key that is required with every request.

As well as the five (four for an OPML feed) set of required parameters there are a number of additional optional parameters for tailoring your feed, they are:

version - (recommended) The version of the API feed. There is currently only one version (version 1.0) of the feeds, built over time this is likely to change. Therefore it is recommended that the version parameter is included to safeguard you application against changes in the feeds. Not including this parameter will always return the latest version of the of the API feeds.

count (optional) - The number of entries (items in RSS) a feed will contain. Omitting this parameter returns the default 10 entries per feed and the maximum allow count is 100.

semantic (optional) - Provides a semantically marked version of the content in an RDF format. This uses the Reuters Open Calais service to automatically extract entities from within the content and give meaning and relationships in the form of metadata to the content. Values include: calaisrdf, calaissimple or calaismicro

callback (optional) - The callback parameter allows you to specify the name of the callback function which the returning Json feed is enclosed - this parameter is only used for JSON feeds. The default callback function for Json is handleReutersJson(...)


See the all the possible parameter values in the feed appendix and for more details on how to use the API feeds please see the Using the API Feeds section in the Handbook