Yaron Koren

About me: it may sound odd, but I believe I am the first freelance semantic-wiki developer in the history of human existence. Other facts about me: I live in New York City; I've lived all around the city for the last 10 years or so, and before that I got my undergraduate degree at MIT. I grew up in Haifa, Israel, and then Amherst, MA.

My weblog

Current interests

• Semantic wikis - These days I do almost exclusively MediaWiki development, based around the Semantic MediaWiki plugin, which I think is world-changing. I've created nine extensions around it, among them Semantic Forms (the most important one), which allows for the creation of collaborative, form-based structured data; Semantic Drilldown, which provides an interface for browsing that data; and External Data, which can retrieve information from external APIs. See an explanation of all the Semantic MediaWiki extensions, and a biography of my MediaWiki development career. And you can also read two of my relevant blog posts - "Semantic wikis are the future of information" (from December 2007) and "Semantic wikis are the future of systems integration" (from May 2009).
• Battlestar Galactica - respect.
• Jean-Michel Basquiat - the greatest?
• Español - I'm trying to learn Spanish at the moment - you never know when it could become important to know.
• Music - at one time or another, I've played the clarinet, saxophone, piano, guitar, bass guitar and drums. I'm partial to indie pop, New York hip-hop and small-group jazz.

Sites I've created

• Referata - a hosting site for Semantic MediaWiki-based wikis.
• Discourse DB - co-created with Nick Grandy; we based it on top of MediaWiki and the Semantic MediaWiki plugin, and later I improved it with Semantic Forms and my other semantic extensions. In my opinion, it was (and is) the first true wiki database.
• Betocracy - my (mostly) solo project, which let users create their own prediction markets. It's also defunct - see here for why.
• NewYorkNabes, the renter's guide to New York City neighborhoods - I programmed it; it's defunct now due to one of the other co-founders forgetting to renew the domain. Oh well.
• Computer Arithmetic Algorithms Simulator - a site I created for my dad. I did most of the layout and some of the programming.

Recommended books

Programming languages

• The C Programming Language, Kernighan and Ritchie - some people still have to know C.
• Programming Perl, Larry Wall et al. - when there are no answers, Perl is the answer.
• Programming Ruby, Dave Thomas et al. - still my favorite programming language, in theory.
• Agile Web Development with Rails, Thomas, Hansson et al. - did Rails hit its peak in 2006? I don't know, but it's still good.

Interface design

• The Humane Interface, Jef Raskin - give users just one way to do anything, and let them undo it afterwards.
• Don't Make Me Think, Steve Krug - your web site is probably more confusing than you think it is.

Software management

• The Mythical Man-Month, Frederick Brooks - when the software gets too complex, don't hesitate to start from scratch.
• Getting Real, Jason Fried et al. - stay small, keep things simple, and release quickly. Is that so hard?
• Siddhartha, Herman Hesse - talent and experience usually aren't as important as enjoyment of the task and the desire to see it finished.

History

• The Cash Nexus, Niall Ferguson - the most irrational mass behaviors usually have a financial explanation.
• The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb - sadly, understanding the past doesn't mean we can predict the future.

My other pages

• On Facebook
• On LinkedIn
• On Meetup.com
• On MySpace
• On Friendster

Random stuff

• My Amazon wishlist - gifts are welcome!
• Articles and reviews I wrote for The Tech, MIT's school newspaper
• Analysis of my 2001 Jeopardy! appearance - I'm amazed that this exists.
• Interview of me by Nate Olson at NewAssignment.net
• Interview of me about Referata, by Jennifer Zaino at SemanticWeb.com
• For no very good reason, I have an Erdős number of 2.

Family

• Prof. Israel Koren - my father. I made this page, too!
• Zahava Koren - my mother.
• Yuval Koren - my brother, CEO of Eye-Fi, and family.