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<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>Hello everyone,<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>I’m Eric Astor, yet another SoC (Summer of Code)
student. I don’t have any code posted in my git repository yet - the
little code I’ve used for testing purposes makes use of an external open
source library, but I need to check into some possible redistribution
restrictions first. Obviously, this isn’t likely to be the final code I
use – or anything like it, for that matter. There’s some question
on the matter of algorithms…<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>This week, my main work has been assembling a spec for the
set of utilities that I intend to work on… these obviously include the
actual ranking utility, using an algorithm yet to be determined. However, I’d
also like to at least start work on an export utility, to get the raw MediaWiki
data (wikitext and such) into a format readable on the laptop. I spent most of
the week researching formats and existing export techniques, without any real
conclusion. However, I have a basic spec draft done – not including the
export format. I’ve posted the draft at <a
href="http://home.comcast.net/~epastor/SoC-OEPC_Spec.odt">http://home.comcast.net/~epastor/SoC-OEPC_Spec.odt</a>.
<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>I’m planning to spend the next week looking into
algorithms again. In particular, I’m hoping to start the slow process of
resolving the patent issues around network centrality algorithms (which are
currently keeping me from posting the code I have so far), while also looking
for alternatives with less patent issues. Of course, the resolution could be
that I can’t get permission to use either of the big two established
techniques, in which case it’s looking like I’ll have quite a bit
of research to do. One of the patents (*cough* PageRank *cough*) actually appears
to cover even the most basic method of determining network centrality, which is
to compute the dominant eigenvector of the adjacency matrix, so I’ll need
to check into that. I’ll be consulting Ivan quite a bit on the potential
politics of this process… the last thing I want to do is make anyone else’s
job harder by screwing up my own.<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'><o:p> </o:p></span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>- Eric<o:p></o:p></span></font></p>
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