Open data sources like Metaweb, Wikipedia, and SEC Edgar database

I just read a few month old blog by Toby Segaran (author of the very useful book Programming Collective Intelligence) on link information for shared board of directors members between large corporations. Many years ago I did something similar from combined CIA Factbook and SEC Edgar data and I still have a SQL dump file on my Open Source web page.

Since Toby works at Metaweb he fetched the corporate director link data from Metaweb (Freebase). Freebase sets a high standard for the ease of finding and extracting information. Other sources like Wikipedia (via custom web scraping or fetching their entire database) or the RDF extraction of Wikipedia (DBpedia) are not as simple to use, but still useful.

I have a long history of organizing and cataloging information, starting in the 1980s at SAIC. Back in the pre-gopher days, I used to maintain lists (as plain text files) of where to find useful tools and information on FTP sites on the Internet and when someone would ask me where to find something then I would grep my own lists. Things have improved a lot since then :-)

I just finished the rough draft for an article on the Semantic Web this morning. Although standards like RDF/RDFS/OWL/SPARQL are very useful, I expect the Semantic Web to also have a strong ad hoc component. However ad hoc information sources may have standard interfaces built for them (E.g., SPARQL end points, etc.)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Dad's work with Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller

Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller facilitated my Dad getting a professorship at UC Berkeley when I was 3 years old. Oppenheimer left Berkeley but Teller was a good friend of my father and I remember him being in our home. Three weeks ago, my wife and I were just leaving to see the new Oppenheimer movie when my Dad called. He mentioned that when I was in grade school he was invited to give a talk at Princeton. After his talk Oppenheimer talked with my Dad and invited him to have dinner at his house. My Dad said Oppenheimer was not well (I think he died of throat cancer soon afterwards) but his wife Kitty carried the conversation. My Dad, Ken Watson, passed away 10 days ago on August 18, 2023.
Read more

Ruby Sinatra web apps with background work threads

In Java-land, I have often used the pattern of writing a servlet with an init() method that starts up one or more background work threads. Then while my web application is handling HTTP requests the background threads can be doing work like fetching RSS feeds for display in the web app, perform periodic maintenance like flushing old data from a database, etc. This is a simple pattern that is robust and easy to implement with a few extra lines of Java code and an extra servlet definition in a web.xml file. In Ruby-land this pattern is even simpler to implement: require 'rubygems' require 'sinatra' $sum = 0 Thread.new do # trivial example work thread while true do sleep 0.12 $sum += 1 end end get '/' do "Testing background work thread: sum is #{$sum}" end While the main thread is waiting for HTTP requests the background thread can do any other work. This works fine with Ruby 1.8.7 or any 1.9.*, but I would run this in JRuby for a lon
Read more

Time and Attention Fragmentation in Our Digital Lives

  As humans we have evolved over a few million years to be both attentive and reactive to danger, live in social communities, and spend much of our time being in the present moment gathering and eating food and socializing. The behavior of rapidly changing short attention to content on social media, too many good short form things to watch on streaming video entertainment platforms, are all rewiring our brains in an unnatural and unhealthy way. I fight back, but in really simple ways that entail little ceremony: Almost every morning I spend 30 minutes scanning Hacker News (about 10 minutes), Apple News (about 5 minutes), and the remaining time on Twitter and Mastodon finding interesting new (mostly tech) things. I make notes in a temporary Apple Note: links of things I may want to research, try, or simply read that day. I like to get this all done at once, and then not feel like I need to interrupt my activities during the day to “catch up” on what is happening in the world. In a way,
Read more