Category Archives: Open Knowledge

Making Milton sparql

I’ve been going over some ideas that have been bubbling in my mind for a while about using RDF to load in further details about a test in question. I’ve gone back to an old Milton file, the Areopagitica,  that I created for another project but never really used. Essentially its part of the Burke […]

Installing Xapian into Open Correspondence and next steps

As an aid to getting over the first (and hopefully last) seasonal cold, I’ve been implementing Xapian as a search engine, using the Python bindings. I did look at Solr as an alternative but the set up costs outweighed the fact that Xapian is already installed on the server as part of Python. Unlike OpenMilton, […]

Tagging the revolution – exploring Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France

Over the weekend, I read an interesting article, “Edmund Burke: How did a long-dead Irishman become the hottest thinker of 2010?“, by Amol Rajan in the Independent on the philosopher, Edmund Burke. In the past I’ve read his musings on the sublime in “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime […]

Never ending death of the book

Devin Coldewey has an intriguing post over on Crunchgear regarding the Google Books project. Google have digitised some books. Just one or two. Like many other people, I find the project useful for finding information and books I’d never come across or lost somewhere. Sometimes I’ll buy the book, sometimes I just need a bit […]

Creating bibliographic resources from web pages

Given the increasingly digital nature of research, including not only websites but blogs, forums, wikis, the (in my view), beloved moleskin is becoming increasingly outdated. I’ve just finished writing my first book and had the joy of using moleskin notebooks to note down urls and make notes. I like moleskins a lot but pen and […]

BBC’s use of Semantic Web technology in World Cup

Just caught this story on ReadWrite Web about the BBC website’s use of semantic web technology during the World Cup.  Jem Rayfield explains more on the BBC Internet blog about the use of technology. I’ve still got a fair amount of reading to do but this is the sort of project that makes me rethink […]

Weeknotes: documentation, prototyping and cats

I’ve spent most of the week either trying to persuade colleagues that rewrites are needed to existing services. I’ve also finally managed to get the initial promise of working from home so hopefully I’ll be able to get the rewrite started on the “quiet” days away from the office. (Although the cat can drive me […]

Weeknotes: Pylons, Python and printing

I’ve been doing some more work to the Open Correspondence website (which is now functional  thanks to Rufus Pollock’s help). In part I’ve been cleaning up the urls for the data controller (which is still coming along) and trying to tie the views in together. Being happier with Apache and PHP I spent some time […]

Weeknotes: Data mining, XML and bibliographies

It seems to be have been a week of frantic completion and refactoring. The first half was spent frantically converting html pages into PDFs using Verypdf’s HTMLtools server product. All in all the manual is very helpful and the test server could be set up quickly. It might have helped the other end if I’d […]

Weeknotes: Redis, RDF, rdflib and openletters

I’ve been trying to play catch up this week at work. One of the projects that I’ve been working on is the temporary storage of information. For one reason or another, one of the workers has decided to occasionally throw a fit and not do its job properly (on top of a connection that appears […]