NeedleBase, by ITA Software*, seems to be a practical way of building a database from unstructured sources. Besides the web scraping (Information Extraction), they have tools for data cleaning/merging, all while maintaining provenance information (i.e. every datum points to its original source). video tutorial

Dapper's Data Mapper is great for ( Read more... )

I already have 5 comments about Google Buzz:

Responding to:
<< William Cohen
I'll try anything once but I'm dubious...Gmail is where I do work, man. Isn't think like storing your candy on the treadmill? >>

Gustavo LacerdaI've had a long time to deal with candy in Gmail, by filtering my messages into labels... some things never get read (i.e. ( Read more... )

I wish it were easier for me to publish a paper in a medium that invited readers to let me know whenever they read a statement that they have trouble with, e.g. by leaving a flag like ( Read more... )

This morning I woke up pissed off because Windows rebooted overnight, forever erasing some notes I had. This motivated me to refine my ongoing manifesto, so it could be LJed. The ideas here are obvious, but it looks like they have escaped pretty much EVERYBODY who ever designed large computing systems ( Read more... )