Would you like to be able to monitor and filter all the information published by the media of a country? Is that possible? The Google News project responded affirmatively to these questions; however, Law 21/2014 on intellectual property, also known as the Google tax, along with restrictions on information aggregation from sources, undermined one of the few available services for automatically cross-referencing news published by the press. After 2014, I embarked on an ambitious research project aimed at creating a system similar to Google News, free from legal and technical constraints, capable of managing as many media outlets as possible. Moreover, the tool was also designed to support scientific analysis of informational Big Data, news filtering, tracking, calculation of media impact, and the study of thematic correlations among news stories. With these objectives in mind, the work began in 2015 during a research stay at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, where the AXYZ software was developed and initial experimental tests were conducted with Portuguese media, achieving significant success between 2016 and 2017, resulting in three published articles in the journals El profesional de la información, Scire, and Transinformação.
The AXYZ program comprises all the necessary components to manage content syndication channels, filter the information they produce, edit and process obtained news in real time, generate statistical reports based on channel classification, informational output, media impact of the news, correlations among different news groups, an internal search engine for collected content, a news map, a block of news saved or selected by the user, configuration and maintenance tools, and a news reading portal. This work has enabled several Spanish universities, including Carlos III University and Complutense University, to acquire and utilize this system for their research projects. Indeed, AXYZ is free software that can be used for research and experimentation purposes. It requires minimal installation, as it is delivered in an AMP server distribution (Apache MySQL PHP) that can be executed under any Windows OS.
Recent versions have incorporated enhancements that even allow news filtering through negative regular expressions. This enables the program to be highly specialized for any topic, thereby reducing potential informational noise.
The program is available on the SourceForge repository and has accumulated over 400 downloads from institutions in 47 different countries, indicating its impact and the value of big data in the field of media communication.