Current Projects

• Writing iPhone optimized websites - expect more on this in another post
• Learning Adobe Flex2
• Playing with the Semantic Web
• Writing horror fiction

Semantic Web Style Queries Over Crunchbase

The great Silicon Valley startup activity blog, Techcrunch,  opened their database of deals, founders, and startups to the public a couple of months ago and dubbed it the Crunchbase. With nice RESTful APIs and JSON return streams, it was good.

But not good enough for Ben Nowack, semantic web technology consultant and creator of the open source ARC libraries to manage RDF and SPARQL from PHP.

Ben wrote a converter to take the JSON from the Crunchbase and make it into RDF. Then he put the RDF under a SPARQL query engine, and gave the world access to it for RESTful calls that can return HTML, XML, or a host of other data types.

Now we can write queries such as

        SELECT ?name ?founded-year WHERE

        {

                ?comp cb:name ?name .

                ?comp cb:founded-year ?founded-year .

       }

 and it will return a list of all companies in the database and when they were founded. Not only that, but since Ben put a real SPARQL engine there we can look at data of jobs at startups (also provided by Techcrunch) and ask interesting questions such as "who, in these spaces, in these geographic areas, and in the following stages of funding, has job openings?" and get a list back across the two RDF data sources on the web.

Wow.

Now SPARQL and RDF took me all of a day to get a working knowledge of. I already have an iPhone interface 90% done. Imagine next week (after I release the iPhone interface!). You get a call from a recruiter, type the company name in, and get all this meaningful data about the company. You look at the founders, see an icon saying one has done other startups, click on his name, and BAM! history of the founder, who invested in him, the works!

There are 100 cool things I can do with this alone.

But today I read about Ubiquity (follow that link!) and my mind goes into creative overdrive.

Mobile computing, semantic web, and clouds. The future is tres chic. Let's get together and be the ones to make it happen.