Grammar
The week was filled with lots of extra-curricula stuff, mostly (though not entirely) due to a visit from the client whose project I'm working on. But by the end of the week I finally had the grammar code parsing a lot of straight forward English into RDF. I also have a few "hacks" to make it a little more RDF friendly, such as picking up prepositions in predicates.

For instance, when I first parsed, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." I was getting a subject of fox a predicate of jumps, and an object of dog. This says a something a bit different to the original intent. By picking up the preposition for the adverbial phrase, I instead get a predicate of jumps over, which is what I wanted.

It's still rudimentary, but it's very cool to stick in natural English and get out sensible RDF. I'd love to open source this stuff, but I did it on the company's dime, so it's their call. Probably not, but they want to get more involved with OSS, so maybe.

On the other hand, it wouldn't hurt if the code were never open sourced. I didn't really know what I was doing when hacking the grammar code, so it could be a lot prettier (and more extensible). Releasing dirty code into the wild can just be a recipe for embarrassment. :-)

Advanced Degrees
DavidW posted his result on the What Advanced Degree Should You Get test. OK, so these tests are far from giving a definitive portrayal, but I couldn't fight the temptation to fill it in. What do you know? I got:

You Should Get a PhD in Science (like chemistry, math, or engineering)

You're both smart and innovative when it comes to ideas. Maybe you'll find a cure for cancer - or develop the latest underground drug.

Not really surprising. Maybe it's telling me to hurry up with this OWL/RDF thing and get back to my Physics postgraduate study (I never intended to be away from it for this long).

Personal
Anne has been keeping a blog about our recent move to Chicago. I've had some of my own thoughts and opinions since getting here, so I finally decided to keep a personal blog about it.

It won't be interesting to anyone who doesn't know me, but I thought I'd mention it in case any of my family ever read these posts. :-)

(Besides, an extra link never hurt a Google ranking. Oh wait... it did).