This is just too cool. Georg Heeg is talking about the application written to determine where Johan Sebastian Bach lived. Apparently, since great fame came to Bach posthumously, the real location of where he lived was lost to history. Amazing what we know about this man, and how the world benefited from his musical creativity, and we don't know where he lived.

Heeg got the contract to build an app which used criminal forensic technologies to gather a huge amount of data, build a semantic network, and figure out which house he lived in.They used VisualWorks, they used Seaside, they wrote their own semantic network analyzation stuff, they used Gemstone/S to store a huge amount of gathered data (basically anything written about the man, much of it in gothic script in old handwriting). The whole thing tells like an engaging Discovery Channel mystery.

Georg documents not only the technology they used, but how the whole story unraveled. And the addresses he lived at (turns out there was more than one). The story tells with how some theories were debunked, as well as the discovery that the city tax collector (long since dead) had defrauded the city for a number of years.