{ Online Notes }All things Technical and Personal – Armando Padilla

The line, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss” comes to mind. Scala is a relative new language and is a functional language. Lift is a web framework which runs scala. For the last few days ive dabbled with both and aside from somewhat fun ive had working with it I have to point out that I dont get it…

No, I dont mean i dont know how to use it. Ive created a few example projects already but just dont get why the the developers decided to change the syntax SO MUCH. Its like …what??? why??? just for the hell of it??? Also one of the selling points for scala is how well it plays with Java. Most of you know from previous articles how i think Java is not for the web so I dont get why scala would be any different. It runs on the JVM and list runs on a servlet container (ex Tomcat). So all the headaches that i had with Tomcat, Java, and the web application are back…great. So far these are my first impressions of both scala and lift. I plan to create a small TO-DO list using both technologies and publish a small tutorial soon.

It was either scala/lift or learn Ruby well. I chose something completely out in left field. We’ll see, heck Scala+Lift is bosting thats it a few times faster than Ruby on Rails. So…

I started to work on a small project on my off time, its a semantic web project based on the use case below.  I started looking into any applications that are currently available to the public and found 2 projects that currently attempt to do what I want to do but come short of it. The idea, if your too lazy to read the below post;  A document parser that will highlight interesting items (‘interesting’ is defined by key words of places, people, and things) Once the “interesting” items are hihglighted he user can hover the highlighted word and see a short description of the item, or present the user with a list of links that might be of some use.

Since i see no point in reinventing the wheel, I found Gnosis and SemanticHacker.com.  Gnosis has a great natural language processor and can accomplish the requirement to find “interesting” items but dosnt provide useful articles.   Gnosis instead send you to a google result page (pretty lame but its a start).  On the other hand SemanticHacker.com has come up with a API that basically does both the Natural Language Processing and the relevance articles but has two drawbacks.  1.  The NLP sorta sucks, well its not as good as the Gnosis one.  2.  Articles of interest are mined from Wikipedia which might not be up-to-date or might be misleading.  3.  No FIrefox plugin.

So what am i going to do now? Easy.  I will check out the API that SemanticHacker has released and work on two things.  1.  Create a Firefox plugin for it.  and 2. Expand on the Knowledge Base the system references.  Move from a wikipedia setting to a flickr (look for tagged relevant images) and a news RSS feeds.

Armando Padilla

I was reading, “Semantic Web Technologies – trends and research in ontology-based system”, and then i started to read some article on CNN.  While reading I started to notice that I wanted to learn more about the earthquakes that happend in china but I didnt wnat to go through google again.

So I started to draw up some plans during lunch to create a plugin for Firefox that would run through a document opened on the browser.  It will then use a natural language processor to find key words; places, events, etc etc.  I then decided to use the API provided by these folks to find related articles on the subject.  Im not sure if this has been done but I have yet to see it done.  yes I know there are keyword ad related scripts on some sites but i havent seen anything that would compliment articles im reading, movies im watching, or basically anything out there.

Time to get back to work.
Armando Padilla