"But there is an ever-increasing appetite from developers and designers for finely structured data to power our digital products and at some point, we will need to develop algorithmic solutions to help with these tasks."
One really cool area in which this sort of algorithm could be applied is identifying location data.
Imagine an algorithm that could scan through a Times story like this one ...
... and extract from the text all location identifiers, then geocode them:
"Seventh Avenue and 36th Street" --> 40.7522877,-73.9897059
"Bleecker Street between Sullivan and Thompson" --> 40.728887,-73.999566
"Chrystie and Rivington" --> "40.7212581,-73.99224"
I used to work for a metro daily, and I developed a script that allowed us to geocode an address by highlighting it in our CMS and clicking a button, but that still required an editor to highlight the correct portion of the text.
Using an algorithm to perform the task instead of an editor would open up some incredible possibilities.
For instance, imagine a local news alerts service in which you could enter your location and a radius, and receive alerts whenever a news item mentioned a location within that radius. (I once developed a prototype of such a service, but the lack of a fully automated process for identifying locations led me to shelve it.)
One really cool area in which this sort of algorithm could be applied is identifying location data.
Imagine an algorithm that could scan through a Times story like this one ...
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9902EFDE1230F...
... and extract from the text all location identifiers, then geocode them:
"Seventh Avenue and 36th Street" --> 40.7522877,-73.9897059
"Bleecker Street between Sullivan and Thompson" --> 40.728887,-73.999566
"Chrystie and Rivington" --> "40.7212581,-73.99224"
I used to work for a metro daily, and I developed a script that allowed us to geocode an address by highlighting it in our CMS and clicking a button, but that still required an editor to highlight the correct portion of the text.
Using an algorithm to perform the task instead of an editor would open up some incredible possibilities.
For instance, imagine a local news alerts service in which you could enter your location and a radius, and receive alerts whenever a news item mentioned a location within that radius. (I once developed a prototype of such a service, but the lack of a fully automated process for identifying locations led me to shelve it.)