Monday 26 April 2010

Late night link roundup

Here's a few interesting links that occupied my late-night browsing...

Facebook's Graph API: The Future Of Semantic Web?

This is interesting for two reasons. One is that this is a hardball play by Facebook to subvert many other sites whose business model is linking social networking to categories of cultural artifacts. The other is the implications for the Semantic Web. I'm not so sure that the latter is quite so easily accomplished, but perhaps the 80-20 rule will truly turn out to be key here.

Mahout 0.3: Open Source Machine Learning

Neat stuff. Pulls together some fascinating technologies like Hadoop and clustering techniques. Perhaps the best thing about this is the chance to learn more about how this stuff actually works in practice. It would be great if there's a spatial component to this.

Colt - a set of Open Source Libraries for High Performance Scientific and Technical Computing in Java. One more nail in the old "Java is too slow" canard.

Wednesday 7 April 2010

Twitter heart JTS

At least, that's what it looks like from their presentation on Handling Real-Time Datastreams at the recent Where 2.0.

They note that JTS does not have support for GeoRSS or GeoJSON. Actually there is a GeoJSON implementation sitting in the labs - but it really needs some funding to get it finished off (hint, hint, Twitter - what, you think this groovy open-source spatial stuff just codes itself?)

And as usual people have not noticed that the real source for JTS information is on the new home page and the Sourceforge site - not this stale web page. Sigh... if only URLs had expiry dates.