The name a system remembers
Canonicalization is not just tidying text. It is how an organisation records what a reference is meant to represent.
Dennis Irorere
Hey there. If you're meeting my curated digital self, well, nice to meet you. I hope to meet you properly someday.
A simple rundown. I'm interested in, and actively working on, representations, information quality, and the data engineering underneath it. Entity resolution, NER, classification, and digital identity: decentralised, self-sovereign, and the question of who decides your data is yours. In more marketable terms: record linkage, knowledge graphs, semantic layers, and intelligence.
Lately that means AI agents, and whether one understands what it is acting on, and knows when to refuse. That's me.
Data for the Rest of Us is out. Order a copy.
Latest
A category is a decision
The same marketplace, address book, or neighbourhood can be grouped many ways. Somebody chose, for a purpose, and the purpose is still in there.
What stays human
The human role is not to beat the machine at recall, calculation, or producing a first draft.
Real Takes Time
A new site, two months of silence, and why I decided to lean in rather than out
Remaining ThoughtFul in AI Acceleration
what does responsible AI-assisted engineering actually look like
Writing the journey, as it happened
- What do I want
- Identity My New Problem Space
- My 2025 A Slow Burn
- Identity Is An Inference Problem
- How Books Are Rewiring Me
Notes living, revised
- The name a system remembers
- A category is a decision
- Similarity is not transitive
- Sameness and similarity
- A place is not a point