[LRUG] Meeting August 8th and September 4th

[Robert McKinnon]

--- "A. S. Bradbury" <asbradbury at tekcentral.org> wrote:
> I'm currently working on a Google Summer of Code Project,
> Ariel[1]. ... If there are any slots available, I'd be happy to
> talk about my project and experiences.
> Give a demo, whatever people are interested in.  Ariel - A Ruby
> Information Extraction Library is a project that employs machine
> learning techniques to extract information from semistructured pages
> (such as, but not limited to, web pages).

Alex, sounds like a great topic for an LRUG talk! Are you able to make
a Sept 4th meeting, 18:30-20:00? (Note: this may be moved to the
following week).

> I could certainly talk about the ideas behind my system,
> compare and contrast with alternative approaches (Regexp,
> RubyfulSoup and now Hpricot). Maybe there's interest in a
> brief look at what tools and resources I've found useful,
> being a relatively inexperienced ruby programming 
> embarking on what is for me a fairly substantial project.
> 
> Is there any interest in this, if so - what would you like to hear
> about? I'm not familiar with the style of most presentations at
> LRUG meetings.

We usually get around 30 people at a meeting - a mix of experienced to
newbies. We've been having two talks per meeting for the last few
months. You'll have a projector and the audience's attention for around
30-40 minutes - they'll want to head to the pub after that! ;)

For a personal project I've been converting HTML to XML with TagSoup (a
Java tool), then using a series of custom REXML SAX parsers to
transform the data into a useful structure. The resulting structured
data is going into a database for a Rails app I'm building. I'd be
interested to see if Ariel would have saved me any time.

cheers,
Rob

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