About me

I am a Ruby/Rails developer and enthusiast, researcher, blogger and recent Mac convert. My primary focus is web scraping/mining - I am the author of several articles on web scraping (one of them cited in Learning Ruby from O’Reilly) as well as Ruby’s perhaps most popular web-scraping framework, scRUBYt! (around 11,000 downloads to date) - but in general I love to hack on anything Ruby/Rails related. When I am not coding away, I am probably chilling with my daughter, playing squash, taking photos or just enjoying life!
Feel free to contact me with any questions at peter@[this site].com, connect with me through LinkedIn and if you think the stuff on this site helped you in some way, consider voting on me @ workingwithrails.

Research interests

Data Mining, Data Extraction and Integration, Semi-Structured Data, Knowledge Representation, Web2.0

Current positions

Ph.D. candidate at Databases and Artifical Intelligence group

Project assistant, Project NextWrap, FIT-IT Programme

Architect & Developer at liXto software GmbH

Projects

		I have joined the company in 2001. Lixto is a web extraction and transformation software - in other words, it turns Web pages (HTML) into meaningful, structured data (XML), which is in turn tailored to our customer’s needs.
		Participating since 2004. Fit-IT is an Austrian research programme that focuses on high-quality research in the area of information and communication technology. Project assistant of the NextWrap project - Next Generation Web Wrapper Technologies.