Scraped/typed into Arcturus
We now have our “beta”-production software for the Green Chain Reaction. We’ve put about 10,000 solvents on the web page. But – if more volunteers take part in the next 2-3 days – that could be multiplied by 20 at least.
The GCR is much more than answering a chemical question (albeit an important one). It’s about Open data on the web. If you get involved, then you’ll start to understand.
As an example what we are doing – in a sort of human mockup – is what Google and other search engines do. It’s called Map-Reduce. If you take part in GCR you’ll understand what Map-Reduce is – painlessly and hopefully entertainingly.
I must thank our several volunteers. They have all played an important part and will continue to do so. They’ve written code, given advice, given moral support (very important at 0200), and shown that – if we want – we can change the way that scientific information is collected, analysed and processed. I’ll explain more later – but I’ve still got code to write.
The steps are simple:
- Download the software and ancillary files
- Download some patent indexes
- Run the software
- Possibly eyeball the results
- Run software to upload the results
That’s it. It probably takes 2 hours to get familiar with what has to be done, and make the first-time mistakes. Then there is an elapsed time of ca. 1 hour running the job. We are getting most of the bugs out of the system so most things now work out of the box – as long as you use the current box!
I now have to create the tools to display the results. Challenging, but we have some good infrastructure
Peter, sounds interesting enough to try, but I’m not sure how. Can you post links for the relevant steps you outline?
For example, where do I download the software and ancillary files? Where do I find some patent indexes? Where do I upload the results?