Timeline

What actually happened. Talks, events, things shipped, books that mattered, and what I was learning at the time.

A record rather than a plan. List 99 is what I want to do and five years is where I am going. This is what has actually happened, which is a different and more honest thing.

Books appear here when I finish one and it changed how I think. The note says why, not what it was about.

15 entries 3 events · 5 milestones · 2 books · 4 learnings · 1 writing ·

  1. learning

    Robin Linacre on probabilistic record linkage

    The clearest account of the Fellegi-Sunter model anywhere, and free. Working through it properly rather than by osmosis, because I have been using the vocabulary for longer than I have understood the maths.

  2. learning

    Apache Ossie, the semantic interchange spec and semantic layer

    Formerly Open Semantic Interchange, donated to Apache and incubating since June. A common format for what a metric actually means, so the same KPI does not quietly mean three things in three tools. Close to my day job and close to the knowledge graph question.

  3. learning

    Correlation clustering, and why transitive closure ruins a graph

    Similarity is not transitive, so pairwise scores cannot produce a partition. Still working out what to do about it.

  4. milestone

    Joined the PKI Consortium

    To learn public key infrastructure properly rather than by osmosis. Narrow interest, non-repudiation and confidentiality.

  5. milestone

    Started the five years

    Picked a direction and a clock. The number in the footer counts from here.

  6. book

    The Infinity Machine — Sebastian Mallaby

    Read it for Demis Hassabis and what it takes to point a research lab at one very long problem. The interesting part is patience, not intelligence.

  7. event

    ID4Africa, Abidjan

    The Parc des Expositions, 12 to 15 May. The continent's identity people in one room. Useful mostly for what it made obvious: everyone is building registries and almost nobody is talking about what happens when two of them disagree about the same person.

  8. book

    This Is For Everyone — Tim Berners-Lee

    His own account of the web. The line that stayed with me is that the architecture was a choice, which means the current shape of it is also a choice and could be a different one.

  9. milestone

    Data for the Rest of Us published

    Troubador. Around fifty copies out so far, which is fifty more than none.

  10. writing

    Identity is an inference problem

    The post where the thing I actually care about finally had a name.

  11. event

    Connected Data London

    Graph people, and the first time I heard the identity problem described in someone else's vocabulary. Good for realising a thing you thought was niche has a whole field attached to it.

  12. event

    AfroTech, United States

    Different room entirely. A reminder that the technical problem and the question of who gets to work on it are not separate problems.

  13. milestone

    Published graphfaker

    A Python package. Second one out in the open.

  14. milestone

    Published overturemapsr

    An R package for Overture Maps data. The first thing I shipped that strangers used.

  15. learning

    MSc Information Management, NOVA Lisbon

    Two years. Where the vocabulary for all of this came from.