Comments on: Spock announces an Entity Resolution competition

By: Alexandre Rafalovitch

Alexandre Rafalovitch — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 02:04:02 +0000

JM,
A very valid point here. All together, it does make you wonder how long it will be before they run into legal troubles.

By: jm

jm — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 01:55:31 +0000

I quickly read their rules, and this part is interesting:

“Spock may use all residuals it obtains from any Software Submissions for any purpose and in any manner it desires. The term “residuals” means information in intangible form, which is retained in memory by persons who have had access to the Software Submissions, including ideas, concepts, know-how, or techniques contained in the Software Submissions. Spock shall not have any obligation to pay royalties or otherwise for any work resulting from the use of residuals.”

I wonder what happens if they try to get a patent based on one of the algorithm submitted.

By: Alexandre Rafalovitch

Alexandre Rafalovitch — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 14:12:46 +0000

Eric,
Glad you find this useful.

CLEANEVAL certainly looks like something to keep in mind. In fact, one might as well enter the CLEANEVAL competition if they want to do the Spock one, as the HTML cleanup would have to be done one way or another.

This may even be something useful to mention to Spock directly (in the forums).

By: Eric Atwell

Eric Atwell — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 19:18:01 +0000

Thanks for telling us what’s in he download file, without having to download it! A group of European reseachers from Leeds and Trento have launched CLEANEVAL, a contest to build a tidy tool for web-as-corpus research, see http://cleaneval.sigwac.org.uk/ ; this could be a useful first-step for anyone trying the spock challenge