hash.ai (Simulations meet the Semantic Web?)

Hi all,

A colleague (Jorge Pérez) pointed out this recent blog post by Joel 
Spolsky, a co-founder of Stack Overflow. The post announces the 
acquisition of Stack Overflow by Prosus (for US$1.8 billion):

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2021/06/02/kinda-a-big-announcement/

In this post he talks about an initiative he is working on that might be 
of interest to this list:

"""
Together with David Wilkinson, I’m helping to build HASH 
(https://hash.ai/). HASH makes it easy to build powerful simulations and 
make better decisions. As we worked on that, we discovered that too much 
of the data that you might need to run simulations needs to be fixed up 
before you can use it. That’s because data is often published on the 
web, using page description languages that are more concerned with 
formatting and consumption by humans. They lack the structure to make 
the data they contain readily accessed programatically, so step one is 
miserable screen scraping and data cleanup. That’s where a lot of people 
give up.

We think we have an interesting way to fix this. If it works, we’ll 
change the web as quickly and completely as Stack Overflow changed 
programming. But it’s kind of ambitious and maybe a little too GRAND.
"""

I'm sure you'll agree that parts of that sound very familiar. :)

Best,
Aidan