Author Archives: iain_emsley

I am a developer in the Janet web team as well as occasionally working on some Open Source projects. The views expressed on this blog are mine alone and are not to be taken as a position or comment by Janet.

Exporting and querying Dickens data

As a follow up to the posting regarding the propsed ontology, I’ve started to try and create a SPARQL endpoint. At some point soon, I want to use the new version of ARC as the version I’ve got here is a little out of date. After that the next thing should be to allow the […]

Creating the text ontology

I’ve been working quietly on ideas for an ontology to describe relationships in  a letter from the correspondent to people referred in the text. It is intended to complement and extend the Dublin Core and Foaf (Friend of a Friend) namespaces. Anyhow I’ve decided to publish a first set of thoughts on it having sat […]

Growing and using data

Just seen an article on Techcrunch by Bradford Cross of Flightcaster regarding the growth of data on the Web. He appears to argue that data and its uses will drive the Web soon, writing: the data age is less about the raw size of your data, and more about the cool stuff you can do […]

Mining data driving the web?

Just seen an article on Techcrunch by Bradford Cross of Flightcaster regarding the growth of data on the Web. He appears to argue that data and its uses will drive the Web soon, writing: the data age is less about the raw size of your data, and more about the cool stuff you can do […]

Digitising books and mumblings on open literature

Robert McCrum, an associate editor of the Observer, has this remarkably sane blog post regarding the nature of digitisation and Google Books. Perhaps it is only my interpreation but it does seem to be a slight volte face on his part, as I’ve always interpreted his stance as slightly anti-digitised books. Having read Adrian Johns’ […]

Varsity article on Open Shakespeare

I’ve just come across this Varsity article on the Open Shakespeare project which the Open Knowledge Foundation run (and I did a bit of porting of for Open Milton). I got involved in other things like the Dickens project and sidetracked that way but the original project has received a second wind.

Bibliographica – open bibliographic sourcing and maintenance

Jonathan Gray of the Open Knowledge Foundation has a thought provoking post on the need for an Open Bibliographic Service which he calls Bibliographica. As he writes: lists of publications are an absolutely critical part of scholarship. They articulate the contours of a body of knowledge, and define the scope and focus of scholarly enquiry […]

Full text search using PHP and MySQL

I’ve been thinking about full text searching for the letters project and trying to find various solutions that are open source. On the Open Shakespeare and Open Milton sites, we used the Xapian  project which is an excellent search engine. However I wanted to try and find a way of getting a search running using […]

Making the web pragmatic?

ReadWriteWeb has an intriguing guest post by Alisa Leonard-Hansen on the the idea of the Pragmatic Web. She takes a sanguine look at the Semantic Web and the fact that it is going to take time to build the machines and networking to fully mine the contextual information that will appear. She explores the way […]

Update on the Letters of Dickens

Just started on a new version of the Dickens letters which I’m trying to improve before adding in further volumes of text and other authors. I’ve refactored some of the code to remove some of the cruft and obsolescence. I’ve also been working on the rdf so that I can build up the RDFa links […]