KnitML etc.

January 3, 2008 at 11:20 pm | Posted in Craft - Misc, Craft - Websites | Leave a comment
Tags: knit, knitml, plushie, research

Neglecting the potential damage of XML tags cost me 3 hours of sleep last night. One trivial “<” has made at least a whole day of computation useless. Unfortunately, that’s how people learn. After all, XML is pretty interesting. It should be carefully handled, otherwise there would be unexpected lose. I guess it’s the same case for KnitML.

I only found out about KnitML via CraftZine not long ago. It actually came into sight when I was looking for something similar. It’s always depressing to see some great crochet/knit projects with free patterns in a language you cannot read. At least it happens to me several times. I cannot help thinking of an automatically translation system. I indeed believe it could be a interesting software project or even a thesis topic. Due to lack of reliable parallel data for training, statistical approach seems not plausible for now. It would be much easier if there is a language-independent representation, which is exactly one of the aims of KnitML. It’s too bad that I’ve had my thesis topic already.  😛

There are many other ways to do research on crafting. I wish I could work on such a topic in the future. “Crazy” ideas come and go all the time. Yuki Igarashi‘s Plushie may be a successful example for a craft lover with CS background. 🙂