Metabase API Specs

Nexis^® Metabase offers a single, unified API with an enriched XML data feed that provides near real-time access to news and social media from around the globe. The flexible integration and output options of Metabase make it an ideal solution for powering your application, platform, research or analytics.

Technical Requirements

The following tech specifications are general estimates.

• 500 articles equates to approximately 3 Mbytes
• Typically customers write around 20 Mbytes per minute to disk, up to 30 Mbytes at peak time
• Average bandwidth is 0.7 Mbps, at peak times up to 1 Mbps
• Size is around 25 GB of data per day uncompressed or 4 GB of data per day compressed
• Calls to Metabase should be a GET. POST is not supported and may results in certain parameters being ignored
• On average, articles are available to customers about two minutes after originally coming into the LexisNexis system. This is the time it takes for the article to be enriched—indexed, categorized, duplicate-checked and tagged. Click here to learn more about our industry-leading content enrichment process.
• The article volume per day varies, but averages approximately 3.5 million articles daily

Output Options

Metabase customers have several output options:

1. HTTPS—Customers can call the Metabase database using HTTPS as well as HTTP.
2. Paragraph Breaks—The content of an item that is contained in the  <content> tag by default includes line breaks to show where the original text on the web page has paragraph breaks (as set-up by <p> and <br> tags in the original article’s HTML). Alternatively, it is possible to retrieve the article content text without the line breaks, as flat unformatted text.
3. HTML Markup—by default content is stripped of all HTML markup (e.g. <a>, <p>, <em>, <strong>, etc.) There is an optional field named <contentWithMarkup> which is available if you would like to receive the content with the original HTML markup intact.
4. Compression—Metabase supports compression for all HTTP or HTTPS requests. Compression can save you bandwidth, and for services like Metabase where content is downloaded continuously, bandwidth can be beneficial.
5. XML—The default format for Metabase payload is XML and content will be delivered in XML without any additional commands. However, adding “&format=xml” to a Metabase call with also specify that the payload be delivered in XML format.
6. JSON—The Metabase payload can also be delivered in a JSON format by adding “&format=json” to a Metabase call.

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