ARIEL: A Mentor’s Mini-Review


This article was modified from its original published form. The most recent modification was on2014-09-29.


I was the mentor of Alex Bradbury’s ARIEL project, which was submitted as “Automated Wrapper Generation for Information Extraction” and was dubbed ARIEL (A Ruby Information Extraction Library) after some discussion. Alex was great. The program was great. The result he’s produced is great—and I’m not the only one that thinks so.

Justin Baily said:

Very impressive library! I remember when you posted about this at the beginning of the summer. I took the library and pointed it at the USCCBs online version of the Bible and got some very impressive results! It was able to identify book, chapter and verse with only[…]3 sample pages[…] ruby-talk:210002

My biggest regret is that I have been so insanely busy that I don’t think that I’ve been able to give Alex1 the amount of time he deserved as a mentor. I only hope that the bits I was able to give him truly helped and didn’t just come across as koans because I was too busy to do much more than I did. But Alex created something useful, and something that I believe he will continue to work on—ultimately I hope that he will be able to attract others to help him build on ARIEL. It’s just a very cool technology that I think will help people make sense of the static web in the transition toward a Semantic Web.


  1. Alex has done well enough for himself despite my benign neglect. He now runs, among other things, the LLVM Weekly mailing list.

  • 2014-09-29: Removed some unnecessary verbal silliness and provided a brief update about Alex Bradbury.[ back ]