Weekly Journal
DREU 2014 @ Arizona State University
Week 1
I arrived late Sunday night after a brief stint in the Las Vegas airport (to no one's surprise, there were slot machines and drunk people). The taxi from Phoenix to Tempe was surreal: cacti, mountains, Mars-like soil, In-N-Out burger. Most of all, there was this stark contrast between my home state of Indiana and Arizona:
My roommates, Xin and Xuanyu, were very welcoming and we seemed to hit it off right away. Since that night, Xin and I have been having nightly jam sessions to Chinese pop music, him on piano and vocals, myself on guitar. Along with the interesting political discussions I've been having with Xuanyu and the incredible food they've been cooking, I look forward to spending more free time in the apartment.
Monday morning, after some difficulty finding the bus to ASU Polytechnic (which is about half an hour away from where I live in Tempe), I met the fantastic Dr. Bansal. We had spoken a little bit over the phone about the project, but this time we were able to lay out a plan of what my time here in Arizona would look like:
- Review research papers related to big data, semantic web, and linked data.
- Choose 2-3 linked open datasets in a specific domain (i.e. health, finance, education).
- Integrate these datasets in an innovative web and/or mobile app.
Item no. 3 is easier said than done; it's also the sort of creative freedom and engineering challenge I live for.
After our chat and some administrative errands, Dr. Bansal sent me off to work on setting up this blog. It was my first time setting up a webserver, registering a domain name, so on and so forth, so I had a lot of fun getting things configured. Initially I set out to use this Ghost blog to write about DREU, but it didn't prove to do everything I needed so I opted for a Bootstrap UI and writing this blog in a text editor.
Semantic Web and Linked Data are interesting fields to say the least. Both are part of an initiative (prompted by Tim Berners-Lee) to make the web more readable for machines by interlinking and publishing structured data. After reading several papers Dr. Bansal gave me to read and seeing some of the datasets that are available, I'm very excited about the potential of the project.
If you're curious about Linked Data and the Semantic Web, here are a few resources you can check out to learn more:
- Four minute video overview of Linked Open Data
- The Semantic Web - Scientific American
- Linked Data - The Story So Far (very comprehensive)
-Sebastian