My book is almost done

I just sent in Chapter 15 for "Scripting Intelligence for Web 3.0" to Apress yesterday. Now I just have to review some final edits. This has been a very fun book to write, and I must admit some sadness over finishing this project and having to move on. I cover a wide range of topics: text processing (NLP), Semantic Web and linked data, strategies for deploying Semantic Web applications, several strategies for implementing search, "scaling up", use of Hadoop for distributed data crunching (with material on using Amazon's Elastic MapReduce), etc.

One of the examples in my book is a rewrite of something that I have been playing around with for years using Common Lisp with WebActions and Portable AllegroServe: a personal system for keeping track of things of interest. I took years of sporadic Lisp hacking, took some of the best ideas, and ended up with a concise Rails application. I am thinking of writing a third iteration of this and making it public: I have a placeholder web app MyThingsOfInterest.com running on the Java edition of App Engine. I need to spend a few weeks clearing a backlog of customer work and then I want to take a crack at version 3. In the last couple of years, I have been doing a lot of Rails web UI programming using the Rails AJAX helpers and some custom Javascript. I don't have very much experience with GWT so working on MyThingsOfInterest.com will be a good excuse to study GWT and compare it with using Rails. The App Engine is an interesting platform and I think it is a fun challenge working within a software stack that limits developer options in return for high efficiency and very low hosting costs. The first thing I need to work out is implementing local search on top of JDO and the non-relational data store. Using Lucene is not a possibility, but it should be fairly easy to support full word and prefix match search on top of JDO.

Comments

  1. Unknown8:18 AM

    Mark, is there any OWL processing or reasoning in this book? Curious minds, and all that. Either way: congrats!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mark Watson, author and consultant9:36 AM

    Hello Kendall,

    I only touch on OWL lightly - the semantic web examples mostly use RDF/RDFS. Although I also use AllegroGraph for one example (RDFS++ support), I stick with what Sesame supports out of the box). About 1/3 of the book deals directly with the SW, and the other 2/3 covers a range of other technologies that (in my opinion) are likely to also be useful for next generation web apps.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Unknown1:34 PM

    Can't wait for this book, when can we get our hands on it?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Mark Watson, author and consultant9:25 PM

    I think that the book will be available in about 5 weeks (in print).

    ReplyDelete

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

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 w...
Read more

I am moving back to the Google platform, less excited by what Apple is offering

I have been been playing with the Apple Intelligence beta’s in iPadOS and macOS and while I like the direction Apple is heading I am getting more use from Google’s Gemini, both for general analysis of very large input contexts, as well as effective integration my content in Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs. While I find the latest Pixel phone to be compelling, I will stick with Apple hardware since I don’t want to take the time to move my data and general workflow to a Pixel phone. The iPhone is the strongest lock-in that Apple has on me because of the time investment to change. The main reason I am feeling less interested in the Apple ecosystem and platform is that I believe that our present day work flows are intimately wrapped up with the effective use of LLMs, and it is crazy to limit oneself to just one or two vendors. I rely on running local models on Ollama, super fast APIs from Groq (I love Groq for running most of the better open weight models), and other APIs from Mist...
Read more