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Larsblog

Archive web services: a missed opportunity

In my earlier piece on NOARK systems I accused the National Archives of standardizing the one thing that should not be standardized: the internal model. This, of course, raises the question of why not, and if not, what should have been standardized instead. ...

Read | 2013-11-24 11:41 | 0 comment(s)

Impressions from Strata London 2013

The first thing that struck me about the conference was that it had to be a fairly new conference. Speakers and attendees didn't really seem to know one another from before. The program was a bit of an odd mix, just like the attendees. And so on. It was still a very interesting conference, however, and the presentations of unusually high quality, so I very much recommend it. ...

Read | 2013-11-20 08:44 | 2 comment(s)

Kveik: Norwegian farmhouse yeast

If I say "domesticated animals", yeast is perhaps not the first thing that springs to mind, but it was actually one of the first organisms to be domesticated. Evidence of domesticated yeast goes back at least 4000 years. Yeast has been produced commercially since at least the early 19th century, and fairly quickly drove out the private strains that people used to keep at home. ...

Read | 2013-11-07 18:19 | 21 comment(s)

The curse of NOARK

I'm writing about a phenomenon that's specifically Norwegian, but some things are easier to explain to foreigners, because we Norwegians have been conditioned to accept them. In this case I'm referring to the state of the art for archiving software in the Norwegian public sector, where everything revolves around the standard known as NOARK. ...

Read | 2013-10-30 10:24 | 3 comment(s)

Norwegian farmhouse ale

It's a well-kept secret that in Norway there exists a homebrewing tradition completely separate from the modern homebrewing that's taken off in the last few decades. The traditional homebrewers don't make porter and IPA, instead they make stjørdalsøl, konnjøl, maltøl and other old styles that hardly anyone outside of Norway ever heard of. Michael Jackson visited some of these brewers back in 1995, but since then things have been quiet. ...

Read | 2013-10-27 13:24 | 15 comment(s)

Active learning, almost black magic

I've written Duke, an engine for figuring out which records represent the same thing. It works fine, but people find it difficult to configure correctly, which is not so strange. Getting the configurations right requires estimating probabilities and choosing between comparators like Levenshtein, Jaro-Winkler, and Dice coefficient. Can we get the computer to do something people cannot? It sounds like black magic, but it's actually pretty simple. ...

Read | 2013-10-20 13:03 | 6 comment(s)

Semantic Web adoption and the users

A hot topic at ESWC 2013, and many other places besides, was the issue of Semantic Web adoption, which after a decade and a half is still less than it should be. The thorny question is: what can be done about it? David Karger did a keynote on the subject at ESWC 2013 where he argued that the Semantic Web can help users manage their data. I think he's right, but that this is only a very narrow area of application. In any case, end users are not the people we should aim for if adoption of Semantic Web technologies is to be the goal. ...

Read | 2013-10-18 15:43 | 2 comment(s)

Big Data and the Semantic Web

This was the theme for ESWC 2013, so it's clearly a subject on people's minds. There was even a panel debate about it, at which I found my thoughts on the subject to be very different from those presented by the panel speakers. So I decided to do a little write-up of my thoughts to add to the conversation. ...

Read | 2013-10-13 12:00 | 0 comment(s)

Impressions of the Riga beer scene

When I landed in Riga, I have to admit I was more curious about the state of Latvian beer than about the city itself. Specfically, I wanted to know whether there were beers of the Lithuanian farmhouse ale type being brewed in Latvia. My sources were telling me no, but I figured there's always a chance. If nothing else, it should be fun to search. ...

Read | 2013-10-07 19:00 | 1 comment(s)

What is craft beer?

I've made a point of never discussing definitions, because all definitions are tautologies. That is, a definition can never be wrong. If I say, "I define horse to be 'any creature which has three legs and one horn'", then nobody can tell me that's wrong. I'm simply notifying you that this is how I use the term. What you can say is that nobody else uses the term that way, and that you don't believe there are a whole lot of things which can be called horses under my definition. ...

Read | 2013-10-04 13:58 | 2 comment(s)

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