OK, now I remember why I like Ruby: reading through the code for the Reality Wikipedia/DBPedia interface

I have been diving deep this year using Haskell, largely in working on examples for the Haskell tutorial and cookbook-style book I am writing. I was revisiting some of my own (old) code for using Wikipedia/DBPedia data and I ran across the very nice Reality library which is written in Ruby. Reality is so very much better than my old code and I enjoyed looking at the implementation.

Ruby and Haskell complement each other in the sense that they are in the opposite ends of programming languages spectrum. If you were forced to only use two programming languages Ruby and Haskell would be good choices. Ruby, like Clojure, has ready access to the vast Java ecosystem via JRuby so the combination of Haskell and Ruby really does cover the bases.

The ability to integrate real world data as found in Wikipedia/DBPedia into systems is a powerful idea. In building AI systems, large companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft preprocess and use available world knowledge (I worked for a while with the Knowledge Graph at Google, so I know their process and I assume that Microsoft and Facebook are similar), however, for small organizations and hobbyists/enthusiasts caching and indexing the world's knowledge just isn't possible but some of the same effect can be had by making live API calls to DBPedia, Wikidata, etc.

While I appreciate the work the 800 pound gorillas (Google/Microsoft/Facebook) are doing, I also hope that a rich cooperating ecosystem of small organizations continues to also claim relevance in building systems that help everyone integrate their own data / knowledge / experience with the deep knowledge that we all (hopefully) contribute to on the web.

I find myself pushing back against the "gorillas" by preferring, when feasible, to participate in community efforts. A good example is using GNU Social as a partial replacement to Google+, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow me on GNU Social at quitter.no/markwatson). In a similar way, I hope that developers contribute to and use good open source projects that support deep knowledge management, deep learning (yeah, "deep" is probably used too often), and AI in general.

In a world where global corporate powers centralize power and control, I believe that it becomes more important for people to make personal decisions to support local businesses, care about the financial and environmental health of their local communities, and continue to use the Internet and the WWW to promote individualism and community, not globalism.

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