Dirk Riehle's Industry and Research Publications

Category: 4. Society-at-large

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
The Parser That Cracked The MediaWiki Code

I am happy to announce that we finally open sourced the Sweble Wikitext parser. You can find the announcement on my research group’s blog or directly on the Sweble project site. This is the work of Hannes Dohrn, my first Ph.D. student, who I hired in 2009 to implement a Wikitext parser. So what about…

2011-05-01
Revamping German Copyright Law #EIDG

The German Enquete commission “Internet and Digital Society” is a multilateral commission instituted by the German parliament to discuss and make recommendations on, well, Internet and digital society. I’m a member of an expert advisory council for one of the parties involved in the commission. I received the following catalog of questions and thought I’d…

2010-10-17