Currently viewing the category: "Knowledge Systems"

Datapkg 0.7 Released

By Rufus Pollock On November 29, 2010 · 1 Comment

A major new release (v0.7) of datapkg is out!

Release: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/datapkg Docs: http://packages.python.org/datapkg/

There’s a quick getting started section below (also see the docs).

About the release

This release brings major new functionality to datapkg especially in regard to its integration with CKAN. datapkg now supports uploading as well [...]

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Versioning / Revisioning for Data, Databases and Domain Models: Copy-on-Write and Diffs

By Rufus Pollock On September 10, 2010 · 1 Comment

There are several ways to implement revisioning (versioning) of domain model and Databases and data generally):

Copy on write – so one has a ‘full’ copy of the model/DB at each version. Diffs: store diffs between versions (plus, usually, a full version of the model at a given point in time e.g. store HEAD)

In [...]

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Author “Significance” From Catalogue Data

By Rufus Pollock On November 5, 2009 · 2 Comments

Continues the series of post related to analyzing catalogue data, here are some stats on author “significance” as measured by the number of book entries (‘items’) for that author in the Cambridge University Library catalogue from 1400-1960 (there being 1m+ such entries).

I’ve termed this measure “significance” (with intentional quotes) as it co-mingles a [...]

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Exploring Patterns of Knowledge Production

By Rufus Pollock On October 15, 2009 · Leave a Comment

I’m posting up some work-in-progress entitled Exploring Patterns of Knowledge Production (link to full pdf) that follows up to my earlier post of a year and a bit ago. Below I’ve excerpted the introduction plus list of motivational questions. Comments (and critique) very welcome!

Exploring Patterns of Knowledge Production Paper ‘Alpha’ (pdf)

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Exploring Patterns of Knowledge Production

By Rufus Pollock On March 18, 2008 · 1 Comment

A definition: the term ‘knowledge’ is here used broadly to signify all forms of information production including those involved in technological innovation, cultural creativity and academic advance.

Largely as a result of better ICT we now have available some very substantial datasets regarding both the extent and structure of knowledge production across different jurisdictions and [...]

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Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy 1944 by Max Hastings

By Rufus Pollock On February 9, 2008 · 1 Comment

7.5/10. Finished a few weeks ago this is another (rather earlier) example of Hastings’ skill in writing penetrating and engaging military history, as well as his willingness to be critical of existing ‘sacred cows’. Among other things Hastings:

Argues that the famous Mulberrys were probably a waste of time and resources. Shows how the Air [...]
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Path-Dependent vs. Ergodic Systems

By Rufus Pollock On January 11, 2008 · Leave a Comment

Consider a metal arm fixed by a pin. If it is hung vertically then the arm, no matter where it starts, will always end up in the same position. However, if you fix the arm (perfectly) horizontally it will stay forever in its initial position. The first case is ergodic: we converge independent of the [...]

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Versioned Domain Models

By Rufus Pollock On March 22, 2007 · Leave a Comment

I’ve been thinking about how to have a versioned domain model similar to the way we have versioned filesystems (e.g. subversion) for over two years. Over the last few months whatever bits of free time I’ve had have gone into developing a prototype built on top of sqlobject and I’ve now got a rough and [...]

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The Robustness Principle

By Rufus Pollock On February 22, 2007 · Leave a Comment

2.10. Robustness Principle

TCP implementations will follow a general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.

Source:

rfc793: specification for TCP date: 1981 editor: Jon Postel url: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/rfc/rfc793.txt
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Thinking about Annotation

By Rufus Pollock On January 17, 2007 · Leave a Comment

Annotation means the adding of comments/notes/etc to an underlying resource. For the present I’ll focus on the situation where the underlying resource is textual (as opposed to being an image, or a piece of film or some data). Various things to consider when implementing an annotation/comment system:

Addressing and atomisation: Are annotations specific to particular [...]

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