The demo processes news stories to summarize them and map entities found in the text to DBPedia URIs. The Ruby code is similar in functionality to the open source Haskell NLP code on my github account. Some background: I have been helping a customer integrate the IBM Watson AI platform into his system. I noticed on Hacker News this morning that IBM's PaaS service BlueMix will very soon offer a sandbox for IBM Watson services. I signed up for BlueMix to have an opportunity to get more experience using IBM Watson. I just spent an hour putting together a quick NLP demo that uses my own entity detection code and the Ruby classification gem which supports pretty good summarization. Give it a try :-) 2014/09/29 update: I stopped this quick demo I put together - is is simple and was just to experiment with BlueMix. A better demo is my KBSPortal.com site. BlueMix is built using Cloud Foundry so if you are already familiar with the Cloud Foundry command line tools then you will f...

I have had a dotCloud account for a while, but so far only to experiment with. dotCloud has announced new pricing models that look very developer friendly with free lower performance sandbox support and "live" support for production. They may have hit the sweet spot for supporting free development while nudging developers to not deploy small demo apps using their free sandbox model. I would love to see Heroku's and dotCloud's customer stats on free versus paid hosted web apps. The basic idea is that as you add services you may by the amount of memory that those services use. I like their handling of horizontal and vertical scaling . I have not tried it yet, but from the documentation it looks like when you horizontally scale a persistent service like PostgreSQL, MongoDB, MySQL, etc. they automatically set up master/slave, replica sets, etc. as appropriate. You can also vertically scale any service by adding memory. Another interesting PaaS that I have experimente...

My friend Alex Ott left a comment on my blog yesterday asking me if I had looked at OpenShift. I had created an account a while ago but never did anything with it. This morning I briefly tried getting Clojure (not yet supported) running but promptly gave up and switched to Ruby, which along with Java, Python, Node.js, and Perl is supported. It only seemed fair to test Redhat's PaaS with a supported stack. By default Ruby 1.8.7 is supported with a lot of gems pre-installed. I preferred to use RVM and Ruby 1.9.3 so I: I created a new empty "Do-it-yourself" Cartridge using the web console. I was prompted to add a public key, etc. Easy setup. A new empty cartridge runs a trivial Ruby web app. I followed Mark's instructions to install RVM and Ruby 1.9.3. After that, a git commit and a git push redeploys your app. You should take a careful look at .openshift/action_hooks/* that are places where you can customize builds and deployments. Using Mark's instructions, I ...

Over the course of a year I spend about 2/3 of my working time consulting for customers and the other 1/3 doing my own projects. I view doing personal projects as a form of continuing education. My last major personal project was my natural language processing (NLP) web service KBSportal.com and at the same time I spent a day writing SleepyBird.us for my wife. The project before those projects was an experiment in a live note taking and scheduling system for consultants ConsultingWith.me which I still use but I have turned off the ability for people to create accounts. I never implemented the sister project ConsultingWith.us . Six years ago my side project was CookingSpace.com which I do still use. For me side projects are a great way to try out new ideas and it is well worth it to me to pass on less interesting consulting gigs to free up enough time for my own stuff. I am in general interested in the combination of knowledge management and NLP and my new side project combines t...