I knew that emojis have Unicode code points, but it wasn’t until I saw this goofy picture in a chat room at work that I began to wonder about using emojis in RDF data and SPARQL queries. I have since learned that the relevant specs are fine with it, but as with the simple display of emojis on non-mobile devices, the tools you use to work with these characters (and the tools used to build those tools) aren’t always as cooperative as you’d hope.
In my data science glossary, the entry for data wrangling gives this example: “If you have 900,000 birthYear values of the format yyyy-mm-dd and 100,000 of the format mm/dd/yyyy and you write a Perl script to convert the latter to look like the former so that you can use them all together, you’re doing data wrangling.” Data wrangling isn’t always cleanup of messy data, but can also be more creative, downright fun work that qualifies as what machine learning people call…
In Spark Is the New Black in IBM Data Magazine, I recently wrote about how popular the Apache Spark framework is for both Hadoop and non-Hadoop projects these days, and how for many people it goes so far as to replace one of Hadoop’s fundamental components: MapReduce. (I still have trouble writing “Spar” without writing “ql” after it.) While waiting for that piece to be copyedited, I came across 5 Reasons Why Spark Matters to Business by my old XML.com editor Edd…
Note: I wrote this blog entry to accompany the IBM Data Magazine piece mentioned in the first paragraph, so for people following the link from there this goes into a little more detail on what RDF, triples, and SPARQL are than I normally would on this blog. I hope that readers already familiar with these standards will find the parts about doing the inferencing on a Hadoop cluster interesting.
R is a programming language and environment for statistical computing and graph generation that, despite being over 30 years old, has gotten hot lately because it’s an open-source, cross-platform tool that brings a lot to the world of Data Science, a recently popular field often associated with the analytics aspect of the drive towards Big Data. The large, active community around R has developed many add-on libraries, including one for working with data retrieved from SPARQL endpoints, so…
