Cascalog at Intent Media

While I was at Intent Media I led the data engineering team in rebuilding and extending the Intent Media data platform. To structure and simplify queries we relied on Cascalog, a Clojure DSL built on top of the Cascading library that is built on top of Apache Hadoop.

Cascalog is inspired by Datalog and uses logic programming to simplify query expression. It is similar to Datomic for Clojure and the recent DataScript for ClojureScript. This allows simple and concise queries, e.g. to compute the average age per country:

(?<- (stdout) [?country ?avg] 
   (location ?person ?country _ _) (age ?person ?age)
   (c/count ?count) (c/sum ?age :> ?sum)
   (div ?sum ?count :> ?avg))

Jon Sondag, a data scientist at Intent Media, recently gave a presentation at the NYC Clojure Meetup about Cascalog in production. His slides are embedded below.

It is great to see Cascalog being used in production data platforms.

Ona builds tally software for the Libyan elections

Ona, a company I co-founded, recently built the tallying software used to aggregate votes in the Libyan constitutional assembly elections. These votes were cast throughout the country, on off-shore oil rigs, and at international voting centers throughout the world.

The Libyan High National Election Commission has generously made the tally system software open source. All application source code is on github, there is an overview of the tallying process, and additional code documentation. A description of the technologies used is posted on the Ona blog.

Mobile Technologies presentation to the Mount Sinai Global Health Program

The slides from our lecture are below:

Introduction to Clojure Presenation at Intent Media

Ivan Willig and I gave a presentation on Monday introducing Clojure and discussing some of the production Clojure code in the Intent Media data platform.

The full presentation is available on github and as interactive slides.

Ruby and Clojure client libraries for the Helioid API

We recently released a Helioid API that returns categorized search results. To retrieve JSON results for a query like “data analytics” simple append “?format=json” to the URL, i.e.

[http://www.helioid.com/searches/q/data+analytics?format=json] (http://www.helioid.com/searches/q/data+analytics?format=json)

To make this easier to use we have released open source Ruby and Clojure client libraries. Install the Ruby library with:

gem install heliapi

then load and fetch categories using:

require 'heliapi'

results = Heliapi.new.web('ruby apis')

results['categories'].keys

which returns:

=> ['Developer',
    'Access',
    'Provides',
    'Rails',
    'Building',
    'Install',
    'Google Api Ruby',
    'Ruby Client'
]

To install the Clojure library add heliapi to your Leiningen project.clj file:

[heliapi "0.0.1"]

then load and fetch categories with:

(:require [heliapi.core :as helioid])

(map #(:name %)
     (:categories (helioid/web "helioid")))

which returns the results as:

=> ("search refinement"
    "search engine"
    "results"
    "helioid choroiditis"
    "intranuclear helioid inclusions"
    "intranuclear helioid"
    "new"
    "helioid search")

We will add features to the API and client libraries as requested. We will also make libraries for other languages as requested.