3
edits
Changes
added proposal
It is still in development and beta launch is planned at the end of November.
== Who was where when, or finding biographical articles on Wikipedia by place and time ==
* [http://morton-owens.info Emily Morton-Owens], The Seattle Public Library (presenting on work from NYU)
* No previous c4l presentations
It's easy to answer the question "What important people were in Paris in 1939?" But what about Virginia in the 1750s or Scandinavia in the 14th century? I created a tool that allows you to search for biographies in a generally applicable way, using a map interface. I would like to present updates to my thesis project, which combines a crawler written in Java that extracts information from Wikipedia articles, with a MongoDB data store and a frontend in Python.
The input to the project is freetext of entire articles in Wikipedia; this is important to allow us to pick up Benjamin Franklin not just in the single most obvious place of Philadelphia but also in London, Paris, Boston, etc. I can talk about my experiments disambiguating place names (approaches pioneered on newspaper articles were actually unhelpful on this type of text) and setting up a processing queue that does not become mired in the biographies of every human who ever played soccer. I also want to mitigate some of the implementation choices I made due to my academic deadline and improve the accuracy/usability.
What I hope to show is that I was able to develop a novel and useful reference tool automatically, using fairly simple heuristics that are a far cry from hand-cataloging familiar to many librarians.
You can try out [http://linserv1.cims.nyu.edu:48866/ the original version] (this server is inconveniently set to be updated/rebooted on 11/8--may be temporarily unavailable)
[[:Category:Code4Lib2014]]
