How Big Data will change IT
One of the changes that Big Data is going to bring to the IT world is a new emphasis on information. For as long as I've worked in IT people have focused on code, algorithms, user interfaces, and functionality, leaving information as an afterthought. I've even worked in projects where system architecture and information architecture are handled by separate teams, with systems architecture not only in the driving seat, but pretty much ignoring the information part entirely. ...
Read | 2013-10-03 19:00 | 1 comment(s)
Thoughts on Big Data
Big Data has really caught on as a buzz word, even well outside the technology world, with journalists writing columns on its consequences for privacy, research, and so on. I'd argue that the Big Data buzz so far has underestimated the importance of this trend, and that its consequences for us all are far more profound than most people realize. I guess that requires a bit of explaining. ...
Read | 2013-09-11 15:06 | 2 comment(s)
Bitcoin: promises and problems
Following on from my explanation of how Bitcoin works I wanted to go deeper into to what degree it works as promised, and what its future is likely to be. We'll go through the points one by one. ...
Read | 2013-06-23 17:18 | 7 comment(s)
Bitcoin: how it works
Imagine an alternative digital currency based on cryptographic principles, designed and launched by persons unknown, running as an uncontrolled and uncontrollable peer-to-peer network. The network has no central authority, and no single point of failure. It is, simply, made up of a self-regulated network of computers connected to each other, speaking the Bitcoin protocol between one another, and nothing more. ...
Read | 2013-06-12 17:03 | 2 comment(s)
RDF triple stores — an overview
There's a huge range of triple stores out there, and it's not trivial to find the one most suited for your exact needs. I reviewed all those I could find earlier this year for a project, and here is the result. I've evaluated the stores against the requirements that mattered for that particular project. I haven't summarized the scores, as everyone's weights for these requirements will be different. ...
Read | 2012-09-17 19:56 | 41 comment(s)
Experiments in genetic programming
I made an engine called Duke that can automatically match records to see if they represent the same thing. For more background, see a previous post about it. The biggest problem people seem to have with using it is coming up with a sensible configuration. I stumbled across a paper that described using so-called genetic programming to configure a record linkage engine, and decided to basically steal the idea. ...
Read | 2012-03-18 10:06 | 5 comment(s)
Bayesian identity resolution
Stian Danenbarger has been telling me for a while about entity resolution (as he and many others call it), or identity resolution (as Wikipedia calls it). Basically, it's the process of working out which records/entities/objects actually represent the same real-world things by comparing their properties. Once Stian confirmed that Bayesian inferencing was a common method for this, I suddenly saw how you can actually do a poor man's version of this with just a little basic scripting. ...
Read | 2011-02-11 13:23 | 26 comment(s)
What's up?
While RSS and Atom are a great way to stay up to date on what is published around the web, I think the feed-centric approach taken by most feed readers is suboptimal. For some feeds I want to read everything that is posted, but for others I want to read only those few posts which are about subjects I care about, or by authors I like particularly. Another problem is that some feeds (for example those of newspapers) have hundreds of posts every day. Staying on top of that is just too much manual effort. ...
Read | 2011-02-03 19:50 | 11 comment(s)
The applications of SDshare
Graham Moore a few years ago came up with the idea of publishing changes to topic maps using Atom, and a CEN project has now developed and published a specification for it called SDshare. Work is also underway to make SDshare a full ISO standard. ...
Read | 2010-11-21 14:29 | 0 comment(s)
My report on OOXML and ODF
Disclaimer: Work on this in the Norwegian government has been going on for years. I worked on this for four months, producing a 45-page report. This blog posting oversimplifies most of the way through in the interests of brevity. ...
Read | 2010-05-09 20:47 | 13 comment(s)
