Dirk Riehle's Industry and Research Publications

Category: 4. Society-at-large

On the technology behind the Wikipedia sexism debate on “American women novelists”

The English Wikipedia is currently embroiled in a debate on sexism (local copy), because of classifying female American novelists as “American Women Novelists” while leaving male American novelists in the more general category “American Novelists”, suggesting a subordinate role of female novelists. I find this debate regrettable for the apparent sexism but also interesting for…

2013-04-28
Call for participation: OC13 – Open Commons Kongress in Linz, Austria, 2013-05-14

Please consider participating in the Open Commons Kongress, OC13, in Linz, Austria (I’m on the advisory board.) More information below (in German). [DR] OC13 – Open Commons Kongress 14.05.2013, 9:00 – 16:30 Uhr Wissensturm Linz, Austria Lernen und Leben mit digitalen Gemeingütern Zum zweiten Mal veranstaltet die Johannes Kepler Universität Linz und die Open Commons…

2013-03-30
Looking back on one year of public policy consulting

2012 was the year when I first did some serious public policy consulting. I found it quite informative to see how politicians work and what the impact of lobbyists is. I’m a professor of computer science at a German technical university. I also have an M.B.A. from Stanford. I consult on open source, software development,…

2012-12-23
Why open source is good for German software businesses

I’m on the expert advisory committee of one of the German parties for the current “Internet Enquette”, a commission tasked by the German parliament with suggesting future directions for Germany’s stance toward the Internet and everything digital. At a meeting this evening, a lobbyist confided in me: “Open source is bad for German software vendors!”…

2012-01-16
Design and Implementation of the Sweble Wikitext Parser: Unlocking the Structured Data of Wikipedia [WikiSym 2011]

Abstract: The heart of each wiki, including Wikipedia, is its content. Most machine processing starts and ends with this content. At present, such processing is limited, because most wiki engines today cannot provide a complete and precise representation of the wiki’s content. They can only generate HTML. The main reason is the lack of well-defined…

2011-07-29
WOM: An Object Model for Wikitext [Technical Report]

Abstract: Wikipedia is a rich encyclopedia that is not only of great use to its contributors and readers but also to researchers and providers of third party software around Wikipedia. However, Wikipedia’s content is only available as Wikitext, the markup language in which articles on Wikipedia are written, and whoever needs to access the content…

2011-07-29