We're tremendously excited to announce that the first new system of the forthcoming GDELT Generation 3 release will be coming shortly in the form of a massively upgraded Visual Global Knowledge Graph (VGKG)! Over the next few weeks the new VGKG will come online with a host of new features including EXIF support and perceptual hashing. However, the biggest change will be the transition of the VGKG to the new GDELT Generation 3 platform. The most immediate external change will be that VGKG data will become externally available at 1 minute resolution (and internally available at subsecond resolution) rather than the current 15 minute resolution. In this initial release the VGKG will still be fed from the existing GDELT platform, so there will still be up to a 45 minute wait as articles make their way through the GDELT processing pipeline. However, as the rest of GDELT transitions to the Generation 3 architecture over the next few months, the final result will be that within seconds to a few minutes of an article being published worldwide it will pass through the entire GDELT processing pipeline, including the VGKG and available for use!

Note that the current GDELT 2.0 VGKG 15 minute feeds will continue to be supported with no change, though once the new version of the VGKG becomes available in the next few weeks we highly encourage users to transition to it. However, given that the EXIF and perceptual hashing results will be added to the JSON block even for the GDELT 2.0 feed, we encourage VGKG users to ensure they are using a proper JSON parser when reading the JSON block, rather than hardcoded regular expressions or character counts to ensure their workflows are not interrupted as these new fields become available.

Stay tuned!