The SOM bus

If your newsroom shares stories over a SOM message bus, Nuvelics can join it. It reads the story messages that other systems publish, optionally checks each one for you, and publishes what it found back to the same bus, where the systems listening to it can act on it. Each organization has one bus connection. The steps to set it up are in the SOM settings tab; what you can follow of its activity is under SOM.

What flows, and which wayCopy Anchor Link

Nuvelics does not publish its own stories to the bus. The SOM Producer role is shown on the connection form but cannot be turned on yet. Only the results of checks go back.

What to ask your bus operator forCopy Anchor Link

• The broker addresses, as host:port, comma-separated and without a scheme. The bus is Kafka-based.
• Whether the connection is encrypted. Leave encryption on unless the bus does not support it.
• A way to sign in: a username and password, and the mechanism the bus uses (PLAIN, SCRAM-SHA-256 or SCRAM-SHA-512), or confirmation that the bus needs no authentication.
• The topics your account may read, and, for results to go back, permission to publish. Wildcards such as som.story.* work.
• That they allow the System ID and Consumer group ID Nuvelics shows on the connection. They are derived when the connection is created, you share them with the operator, and they cannot be edited.

What Nuvelics does with each messageCopy Anchor Link

1. Reads it off the topics you subscribed to and records it in the Inbox, with its topic, type and status. A message is Received when Nuvelics understood it, Skipped (unknown) when it is a type Nuvelics does not use, Skipped (echo) when it is one of Nuvelics's own results coming back round the bus, and Error when it is malformed.
2. Follows the story. Snapshots of the same story are grouped, so you can read a story's whole cycle under SOM.
3. Checks it, if Execute skills is on. For each snapshot Nuvelics fact-checks it with the same enrichment engine it uses on its own stories: it researches the claims, also reads the story text the snapshot links to where it can, and reports claims it could not confirm. It also runs every enabled story check whose Channels include SOM snapshots (when skills are on).
4. Publishes the results. Each message carries a stable identifier, so if the bus is down for a while the results are sent when it returns, and a resend is recognised as the same message.

The text of a snapshot may be partial: a snapshot is a summary of a story and links to its text. If Nuvelics cannot read a link, it checks without the text and the run still completes.

What to expectCopy Anchor Link

• Execute skills costs money per message. It runs language-model and search work on every message your organization receives. It is off by default and applies only to messages received after you turn it on.
• It needs two things: the SOM Consumer role on, and a subscription that covers the som.story.context topic.
• Check the connection on the Bus connection status, which shows Connected, Connecting, Checking, Paused, Not reported yet, Status stale or Not connected, with a hint by cause: rejected credentials, no reachable broker, or a topic the account is not allowed to read.
• Pausing stops Nuvelics connecting to the bus and nothing else; your settings stay.
• A saved password stays with its brokers. Changing the brokers, turning off encryption or switching to PLAIN without encryption requires you to enter the password again, so that saving a change can never send the stored password somewhere new.
• Reading the activity is open to everyone in the organization. The SOM page appears for every role once a bus is set up; configuring it is for owners and admins.

Manage it another wayCopy Anchor Link

• API: SOM configuration and SOM activity.