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Content Agents for Company Vocabulary

Siebel Company Vocabulary is a database of company identifiers based on D&B's D-U-N-S Number. By linking the accounts and competitors in your Siebel database to D-U-N-S numbers, you also gain access to other identifiers, such as the stock ticker symbol. This allows you to create content agents that can use these company identifiers when submitting requests to external content providers. This vocabulary configuration scenario is described in Briefings Configuration Scenarios.

For example, suppose that the third-party content provider in Figure 4 is NewsEdge Corporation. Suppose also that NewsEdge Corporation indexes company information by stock ticker symbol.

You could build a content agent that would pass the D-U-N-S Number to the Siebel Company Vocabulary host. It would pass along with it the URL that you plan to send to NewsEdge. The NewsEdge URL is sent along as an argument and it is formatted to include search terms from the company vocabulary database.

After the Siebel Company Vocabulary host receives the request, the content agent retrieves the corresponding stock ticker symbol and then includes the stock ticker symbol in the NewsEdge URL. The NewsEdge URL is then sent back to your server.

The content agent evaluates whether to display a link to NewsEdge or to submit a request to NewsEdge for an HTML document. If it is a link, the link is built into a Briefing document. If it is HTML, an HTTP request is sent to NewsEdge. Then NewsEdge returns the requested HTML, and it is displayed in a Briefing page.

Figure 4.  Content Agent for the Company Vocabulary

For more information about linking D-U-N-S numbers to accounts and competitors, see Associating Accounts with Briefings Topics.

To define a content agent that retrieves data from the Siebel Company Vocabulary database, you must define the following:

• URL to the Siebel Company Vocabulary host

  GetIncludedURL

• An argument representing the D-U-N-S Number from the Siebel database:

  Arg:MID =MID

• An argument representing the URL to your external content source, including:
  • Tokens for the values you want to insert. For example:

  {TICKER}

  • Authorization credentials
  • Other arguments

    For example:

  Arg:URL = http://demofour.newsedge-web.com/NewsEdge/Headlines?SrchInput={TICKER}&Username=demo&Password=demo

• A value for Arg:INCLUDE:

  1 = HTML

  0 = Link to HTML page

• If the value of Arg:INCLUDE is 0, then add a value for Arg:LINKTEXT.