[Chicago] New Member

[Kumar McMillan]

Hi Allan, welcome.

On Sat, Oct 4, 2008 at 11:34 AM, Allan Spale <allan2600 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> My name is Allan and I am interested in learning more about the Chicago
> Python users group and where and when your next meeting will occur.

Our next meeting will be the best ever.  I just updated the wiki with
details: http://chipy.org/

Chris is giving a talk on Miro and I'll be giving a talk on freebase
but I'm not an expert on it.  I think Jordan Sherer might also give a
talk on desktop apps?

If there's time for discussion, maybe we can talk about the future of
"semantic web" -- freebase is just one of the semantic tools emerging
but I also don't know much about this so-called movement.

Kaleidoscope looks interesting but ambitious.  I get overwhelmed
easily when I hear of tools designed to organize all the data of the
world.  Not that I don't think it's possible, it just seems really
hard.  One thing is for sure, the Google model is far from perfect and
if something comes along and does it better then they will be in
trouble.  Freebase is pretty ambitious too.  But then again so was
wikipedia and that worked.

-Kumar

>
> To give you some background about myself...I have been working on an
> internet startup for the past year or so in which I am developing an
> open-source semantic database system that takes some of the ideas from
> Freebase but goes into a somewhat different direction. You can read more
> about the system here: http://my-kaleidoscope.org/platform.html. The
> datastore I am using is pybsddb (BerkeleyDB module for Python), but the
> system was designed in such a way to support any datastore whether it is a
> traditional SQL system or something more non-traditional like Amazon S3. I
> did a very scaled down demo at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo in New York City a
> few weeks ago doing a mashup of the working parts of my database system and
> using Twitter as a frontend:
> http://en.oreilly.com/webexny2008/public/schedule/detail/5266. I would
> invite all of you to take a look at it, but I am having a terrible time
> trying to get my code to work on the web server space that I listed (the
> demo was a hack of running mostly local and partially on the webserver).
>
> Attending this conference made me realize that I am probably not a good
> candidate for funding my startup, but as I look for a job now (any leads
> would be appreciated), I still want to develop this system for the Python
> community. So, I am also interested in meeting developers who might be
> interested in working on this project because my established codebase is
> fairly large (about 15000 lines) even without many features being
> implemented.
>
> I look forward to meeting all of you at the next meeting.
>
>
> Allan
>
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