I use a self-built WordPress theme for this blog. I also use a variety of self-developed WordPress plugins for various enhancements. I used to publish these plugins, but I get terribly confused by the SVN shenanigans involved, and they weren't used by many people, so I stopped. Recently, I've been moving all my plugin code into my theme. This is sort-of-but-not-quite a MonoRepo. I've also tried to move away, as far as possible, from using other people's plugins. Most of the ones I had were …
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Knowledge graphs are tricky beasts to create. Trying to extract semantic metadata from documents is a gargantuan task. Mix them together and you have a recipe for disaster. While yak-shaving for my MSc, I found an interesting looking research paper authored by one JC Shakespeare. As you can probably tell from that snippet, there is something a bit hinkey going on here. Here's the page that Google Scholar has scraped: It's pretty easy to see what has happened here. The algorithm (whether …
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About a million years ago, I was discussing the FOAF (Friend of a Friend) ontology with its early proponents. It allowed you to define a machine-readable semantic relationship like "Alice is married to Bill" and "Bill is Carol's child" and "Carol works for David". That sort of thing. At the time, all the FOAF relationships were defined in terms of positive sentiment. There wasn't (and still isn't) a FOAF representation for "divorced" or "estranged" or "fired by". I thought this was a failing.…
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Some of you may be familiar with the Feynman Algorithm. It is a general technique to solve any problem. The steps are as follows: Write down the problem. Think real hard. Write down the solution. Easy! As part of my MSc, I have to write a series of assignments. These are essays with a strict word count and an even stricter marking scheme. I'm proud that I've successfully developed a technique for writing these assignments. I've noticed that a number of students don't know where to begin…
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