The SitePoint PHP blog has a tutorial posted by Patrick van Bergen showing you how to analyze the world using a combination of PHP and the data from the GDelt (Global Database of Events, Language and Tone) database.

Are you interested in political world events? Do you want to play with one of the world’s largest databases? If you answered either of those questions with a yes, keep reading – this will interest you! This article follows up on the promise to use GDELT with PHP.

I will show you a simple example of how to use GDELT through BigQuery with PHP, and how to visualize the results on a web page. Along the way, I will tell you some more about GDELT.

He starts by briefly introducing the GDelt service, what kind of data it contains and how to make some sample queries with their BigQuery dashboard. He then moves more into the code, talking about some of the basic concepts of the data and setting up an account you can use for your queries. The example code uses the Google Cloud library to access the API and execute the query. Included are examples of querying metadata, the different datasets available and some visualization examples.

In this recent post to the SitePoint PHP blog Bruno Skvorc points out a recent announcement from Google that the GDELT database information is now available via their BigQuery functionality.

The Global Database of Events, Language and Tone is one of the largest datasets on the planet. It is the quantitative database of human society, relying on thousands of news sources from every corner of the globe dating back to 1979. [...] Google BigQuery, “Google’s powerful cloud-based analytical database service” is, basically, the world’s fastest SQL engine, and it’s completely free for any and all uses of GDELT. Due to the sheer power of BigQuery, you can get results on GDELT queries in near real-time and any permutation of fields and values you can think of won’t be enough to bog it down to a halt – unless you really mess things up and go against the grain.

He goes on to describe the GDELT database and what kind of information it contains. He also includes an example query and the kind of data it returns (screenshot). He also links to a PHP-based library that you can install via Composer and use API keys to access their search endpoints.