Monday 14 February 2011

Ontology 101 using Protege

As part of my work, I have created a basic tutorial on using Protege for creating an ontology that I am happy to share here

Thursday 10 February 2011

Linked Data Cloud for the Local Goverments

I was listening to the latest episode in the row between my home council (http://www.nottinghamcity.gov.uk/index.aspx?articleid=1) and the Communities Secretary Eric Pickles(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Pickles) where Eric Pickles called the council Deputy whose name is Graham Chapman (remember Monty Python ?) "very naugthy boy".  The reason for such comments from Mr Pickles is because the Communities Secretary has urged all councils to publish the expenditure details as part of a "government revolution in transparency", although they will not be forced to do so by law. Nottingham City Council is I think one of the very few who hasn't obliged. Here is what Mr Chapman has to say: "It costs virtually nothing - a couple of thousand pounds - to put it online. It costs another couple of thousand pounds to keep it going online. It's likely to cost about £100,000 to service it.


The jokes and politics (or politics as joke!!) aside, here is a great chance for local governments to take part in the Open Government Data movement and specifically expose the data using Linked Data Cloud way. It might have similar costs to put in online but the service costs can be significantly reduced and can allow the developers in the wild to generate interesting statistics and applications out of it.  



Thursday 3 February 2011

JAPE grammar - performance bottleneck

({Token})* pattern in the JAPE grammar can severely hit performance especially while performing Text Mining on large piece of text.  As advised in the GATE user guide, if the if you can predict that you won’t need to recognise a string of Tokens longer than x. Then it is possible to utilize 
({Token})[0,x]


However when it is not possible to predict it, are there any workaround? I am trying to figure out one.
If anyone else can suggest one?