Projects

A sampling of things I have made or am making…

Programming

These days I mostly program using Go. I contribute to various open source Go projects and maintain a few useful packages of my own:

• starbow - a server for calculating statistics from streaming data.
• datatable - a column-centric data structure for aggregating data.
• salience - detect interesting portions of images
• ratelimit - rate limiting of functions using a leaky bucket algorithm
• circuit - a battle tested implementation of the circuit-breaker pattern
• gedcom - a GEDCOM parser
• microdata - a microdata parser

I also maintain the Go Cookbook, a collection of useful hints and tips for new and intermediate Go programmers.

I have a couple of longer term Go projects on the back burner, not in a usable state yet:

• wedb - a simple, collaborative, online database

I like generative art such as this “bent-H”, created by my growth package

RDF and Linked Data

A lot of my projects have been related to making data work on and across the web. I am an advocate of open knowledge and place the majority of my project work in the public domain. Up until about 2012 I was heavily involved in building Linked Data systems. Here are a few of the longer term projects that I still maintain:

• vocab.org - a long term, stable hosting site for RDF vocabularies and schemas.
• ProductDB - an open database of product related linked data.
• BIO - a vocabulary for biographical and genealogical information.
• RELATIONSHIP - a vocabulary for describing relationships between people.
• Evidence - a vocabulary for describing forms of evidence and the hypotheses that may be formed from it.
• FRBR Core - a vocabulary representing the concepts and relations described in the IFLA report on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR).
• FRBR Extended - a vocabulary representing the extended FRBR concepts and relations.
• VANN - a vocabulary for annotating vocabulary descriptions.

I have a special interest in modelling time and history with RDF. Back in 2009 I wrote a 6 part series on representing time in RDF:

• Part 1: Introduction
• Part 2: Conditions and Time Slices
• Part 3: Named Graphs
• Part 4: Reified Relations
• Part 5: N-ary Relations
• Part 6: References

Between 2005 and 2010 I published blog posts detailing my thought processes for modelling biographical information under a series titled “Refactoring BIO with Einstein”:

• Part 1: First Steps
• Part 2: Conditions
• Part 3: Temporal Invariants
• Part 4: Employment and Families
• Part 5: Updated Vocabulary

I also contributed to the following online book co-authored with Leigh Dodds

• Linked Data patterns - an open catalogue of patterns for creating, publishing and using Linked Data.

I am a very poor graphic designer, but somehow I managed to create these:

• FOAF Icons - public domain icons for indicating FOAF files (also in a Github repository).

Other things

Just to up the geek quotient a little more: I’m an avid board game player. I’ve also been working on a couple of digital games under the moniker of Amberfell

I’m fascinated by genealogy and have a back-burner some-day project to open the world’s genealogical data.

• sharedpast.com - my some-day collaborative genealogy project.