flickr™ wrappr

12Oct07

DBpedia extracts structured information from Wikipedia and publishes it as RDF. This allows for incredible queries against Wikipedia data, such as Soccer player with tricot nr. 11, playing for a club having a stadium with >40.000 seats, born in a country with >10M inhabitants.
I recently added support for geo-coordinates to DBpedia and built the flickrâ„¢ wrappr, a proof-of-concept work that provides photos for a given Wikipedia article using geo-coordinates and multilingual labels. The benefit: It is a fairly efficient and accurate way for a machine to find a picture of something. It is now part of the W3C SWEO Linking Open Data community project.

I really like the pictures it finds for the Eiffel Tower:
flickrâ„¢ wrappr Screenshot

Update (04/10/2008): ReadWriteWeb says "This is pure geek hotness", and Tim Berners-Lee says “This is a neat addition”!
Update: Mashup of the day at ProgrammableWeb (10/17/2007) and at Mashup Awards (01/10/2008)!

Animated Fortunes on Facebook

11Oct07

Seemingly, a lot of money can be made with rather useless Facebook applications these days. So I set out to see what it would take to attain exponential growth rates and did a Flash port of a Fortune Cookie site I wrote in JavaScript back in 2003. The application did grow exponentially in the first days, but now its growth is rather linear with 8,300 users as of today, and 100 new users per day. Altura Ventures, who invests in Facebook applications, estimates that this is worth $2,400 already. Can you believe it?
Its home on Facebook is here, and here’s a preview:

Update: Currently broken due to the highest-voted bug on Facebook.

28,482 lines of code just went to SourceForge: SpamIntelligence released under the GPL

19Aug07

SpamIntelligence logoI finally found the time to put my Outlook-based spam filter SpamIntelligence on SourceForge. It contains many C++ classes to Outlook’s kludgy MAPI interfaces, so it should be really useful for anybody developing an Outlook plugin. I am discontinuing its development since I’m moving away from Windows development.

More Details about Friday’s Internet Crash

23Jul07

New Microsoft/Yahoo! Logo?

04May07

It looks like Microsoft may soon own Yahoo!. But how in the world are they going to combine their brands?

Solution 1:
Microsoft!
Solution 2:
Yahoo
(Microsoft! logo courtesy of logo54.com)

Back in Berlin

04May07

Yes, I made it back! And now it’s back to the books. I finally uploaded my Paris pictures (to see more, befriend me on flickr).

Seoul

13Apr07

Recently got back from ACM SAC 2007, where we (FU Berlin) presented our paper on Multidimensional Querying in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks. Good conference and a very interesting country. Here are some nice pictures.

Paris

05Mar07

A moment of silence please, for this is my very first blog entry! Hopefully I will manage to write a few entries before blogging becomes unpopular again.
Having spent an exchange semester at Paris X, I am now working at Umanis on the subject of XBRL, an exchange format for business and financial information that is currently being implemented for bank supervisory across Europe. I’m mostly involved with the COREP/FINREP project at the French central bank. More to come soon.


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About

I'm a partner a MES, a consultancy focused on streaming media, and a PhD student at Free University of Berlin, where we are making the Semantic Web become reality. To learn more about me, check out my resume or my profiles on XING, LinkedIn and Facebook.