Archive for the ‘Open Data’ Category

Dev8D is here again…

Posted on January 20th, 2012 by Nick Jackson

Hello all,

The ever popular JISC sponsored Dev8D event is just 1 month away now. Dev8D is the largest event of its kind in the UK and it is your only opportunity this year to get 3 days of free training in essential skills and emerging technologies. This year the event is packed with great opportunities for learning new tech skills, discovering new technologies and collaborating on technical challenges with experts in the sector. At past events attendees have learnt new programming languages, experimented with new software platforms and established lasting communities. As always tickets for the event are free but availability is limited so book soon to avoid disappointment.

This year more than ever the goal of Dev8D is to tool up attendees with skills in essential and emerging technologies for the coming year in away that is practical and fun. There will be sessions for:

  • HTML 5
  • Programming in Python
  • Git version control and source code management
  • Understanding and using Linked Data
  • Using Redis
  • JavaScript and JQuery
  • Writing effective Moodle plug-ins
  • Making your web applications accessibility friendly
  • Coffee Script
  • too many more to name…

Attendees will also get to interact with cool technologies like 3D printers and multi-touch tables and form their own sessions in our larger than ever unconference sessions. Bring your technical problems along and work them through with experts in the sector.

This years event runs from the February the 14th-16th and will be in University of London student union. Remember tickets are free but they are limited so sign up before you miss the opportunity.

You can see more details and register for the event on the Dev8D website at: http://dev8d.org/

Hope to see you there!

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Posted in Open Data, Stuff Which Doesn't Live Anywhere Else, Web 2.0 | (0) Comments | Click here to add a comment »

Directory Data

Posted on November 24th, 2011 by Nick Jackson

If you haven’t guessed it already, we love data in open formats. Good quality, easily accessible data makes our lives easier, and causes children across the nation to beam with joy at the idea that they won’t have to copy a table from a Word document buried in a Zip file attached to an email.

In a continued drive to making all our data 5-star quality, I’m pleased to announce that we’ve made a few improvements to our Staff Directory beta. In addition to getting hold of people’s profiles in HTML using your browser (for example, see mine) you can now request them in three other delicious formats: JSON, RDF/XML and vCard.

The first two, JSON and RDF/XML will make the developers amongst you über happy. You can request them either by slinging appropriate http-accept headers to the usual URI for a person (http://lncn.eu/me/{account_name} is the canonical one), where application/json or application/rdf+xml will get you what you desire. Alternatively, you can hit up http://lncn.eu/me/{account_name}.json or http://lncn.eu/me/{account_name}.xml for the same thing.

The vCard format is of more interest to all, and provides a stupidly easy way to get a person’s details into your address book. By visiting http://lncn.eu/me/{account_name}.vcf (or by clicking the link at the bottom of any Directory profile) you’ll be given that person’s vCard, presenting their name, job title and contact details all in the industry standard machine readable format. It’s literally a matter of one or two clicks (or taps) to get information from the Directory into your computer’s (or phone’s) address book. If you want, you can download mine to see what I mean.

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Posted in DIrectory, Open Data, Orbital | (0) Comments | Click here to add a comment »

All About You

Posted on October 17th, 2011 by Nick Jackson

As you’ll know if you follow the adventures of Alex and myself we’ve been playing around with our new-look staff directory (give the beta a whirl). We’ve rebuilt it from the ground up to be stupidly fast, using bleeding-edge search technology all wrapped in Web 2.0 goodness to deliver your search results as quickly as possible. After all, why would you want to hang around waiting for half a second when we can have the number you’re looking for in a quarter of that time?

Directory search is awesome, but we thought we could do more with this information. We could take a person’s staff directory entry and make it a little bit more epic, as well as a bit more useful on the internet as a whole. So we did, and we’re happy to introduce the (beta) of staff profile pages – for examples see mine, Alex’s, Joss’s and Paul’s.

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Posted in Open Data, User Experience, Web 2.0 | (0) Comments | Click here to add a comment »

Delicious tea…

Posted on June 10th, 2011 by Nick Jackson

Everybody loves cups of tea (or, if you prefer, coffee). Boiling the kettle to make those cups of caffeinated goodness takes energy, something which we’re constantly trying to use less of. Which is why when I discovered some of the University’s energy data I knew what had to be done.

You can now take a look at the electricity consumption of various University buildings expressed as how many cups of tea you could make with the same amount of energy. There’s even a pretty graph which shows how energy use fluctuates over the last 24 hours.

Open data is good – it lets us throw things like this together in a matter of minutes rather than hours.

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Posted in Open Data | (1) Comment | Click here to add a comment »

Where are you?

Posted on June 9th, 2011 by Nick Jackson

We love open data. In fact we love open data so much that we’ve got a whole site dedicated to it, and we’re constantly looking at ways of making our data easier to work with for everybody involved. We’re also constantly looking at what new data we can glean, scrape and make do really cool things; which is why I’m really excited to tell you that we’ve got some delicious new things available over our Locations API.

First of all, I’d like to stress that this data is in no way complete. There’s a major project currently underway with our colleagues in Estates to replace their facilities management software, which when it’s completed will massively improve the quality of an awful lot of our data. In the meantime, here’s what’s new in our buildings data.

For all the social media junkies out there, some Foursquare data. We’re now including Foursquare venue IDs for buildings where we know them, and our Foursquare curation team are constantly adding to our brand page, making sure venues are correctly located, categorised and full of good tips. You can take a look at Foursquare’s own API if you’re interested in mashing things together – I’ve already got an RFID Check-In machine.

Next, outline data and latitude/longitude. You may remember that a feature of one of our old APIs was some lat/long data which could be used to work out where buildings were in a physical space. We’ve now started taking that a step further, not only providing just latitude and longitude but also providing an array of lat/long points which draw the outline of a building! Drop the points onto a map and draw a closed polygon between them and you’re done.

Thirdly, related to the second one, you can now request that any call to /locations2/buildings returns its output as a KML file, just by setting the ‘format’ parameter to ‘kml’. This means that you can grab KML for all the buildings on the Brayford campus (as an example) just by requesting /locations2/buildings?campus=brayford&format=kml. KML files are directly compatible with Google Earth, and can even work directly with Google Maps, overlaying a map of our buildings which is generated on-the-fly.

Up next in the glorious race for data is updated documentation, better and easier access controls (and the long awaited application registration), and working with some colleagues in our Social Computing Research Centre to crack open some of our energy usage data.

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Student as Producer, meet Nucleus

Posted on May 22nd, 2011 by Nick Jackson

I’ve not done a theoretical, academic(ish) blog post for a while, choosing instead to focus on the more technical sides of what I’m doing. However, that doesn’t mean that what we’ve been doing is driven purely by the technology.

What I’m talking about in this blog post is our Nucleus platform – a collection of data stores, APIs and authentication mechanisms which, when put together, allows anybody within the University to interact with data in exciting new ways. Of particular interest is how Nucleus meshes with Student as Producer, our new institution-wide pedagogy. Put simply, Student as Producer is all about empowering students to become part of the production and provision of teaching and learning, rather than just consumers. Students are involved in research, course creation and much more on the academic side. It’s already seen some awesome results, and it’s becoming a massive part of how Lincoln does business.

So, how does Nucleus fit in? The answer lies in the potential to unlock the University’s inner workings for Students to mash up as they like. At the moment if the University doesn’t offer a service, students can’t do anything about it. Want a way to automatically renew books if nobody else has requested them? Nah, can’t do that. Want to mash up room availability with your classmates timetables to find a perfect study session and a room to put it in? Tough.

Understandably, as a former student, this isn’t good enough. So part of our Nucleus platform is trying to open as much of this data and functionality as we can up to anybody who wants to have a go. Obviously it’s still held within an appropriate security framework, but we believe that if a student can come up with a better (or different) way of doing something, they should be encouraged every step of the way.

We’ve got some really exciting stuff coming down the pipeline to help us offer support and resources to students (and staff) who want to explore the possibilities. Stay tuned!

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Posted in Nucleus, Open Data | (2) Comments | Click here to add a comment »

So, what’s going on?

Posted on May 20th, 2011 by Nick Jackson

Good question. It’s been a while since I’ve blogged, so here’s a really quick overview of what I’m currently working on, pretending to work on, worked on but haven’t done anything with, or planning to work on.

  1. Linking You, our current JISC project on institutional identifiers. Finishing up next week, and currently causing Alex and myself epic amounts of beating our heads against the desks.
  2. Jerome, our other JISC project on making libraries slightly more awesome.
  3. Zendesk Phase 2, including bits and pieces of integration work to make it smoothly flow through everything else we’re doing.
  4. Nucleus (and assorted fluff), our epic store of everything, being brushed up, pinned down and fully documented.
  5. Authentication being made even cooler, and more reliable, along with support for more stuff like SAML.
  6. GAME, our application management environment, being made more awesome.
  7. Room Bookings will be coming over the summer, allowing people to find and book rooms faster than ever before.
  8. Lots of QR Code goodness all over the place, including on room labels (this hooks up to room bookings for added goodness).
  9. Possibly a bit of hardware hacking in the Library with RFID stuff.
  10. CWD updates to version 3. Faster, lighter, more accessible and generally good.
  11. Total ReCal rollout to replace our legacy Timetable system (we hope).
  12. Replacing the legacy phone book with the new one (we hope).
  13. Data, data, data.
  14. A bit of mucking around with telephony, just for kicks.
  15. Taking another look at our Student Communications project to try and address a few annoyances.

Posted in CWD, Jerome, Linking You, Nucleus, Open Data, Service 2.0, Total ReCal, User Experience, Web 2.0 | (3) Comments | Click here to add a comment »

How Staff Directory Search Works

Posted on January 27th, 2011 by Nick Jackson

I’ve had a couple of people ask how my lunchtime project today actually works behind the scenes, so here’s the lowdown in easily-digestible speak. I should point out that I am relying heavily on two frameworks which we’ve already built at Lincoln. These are Nucleus – our heavy-lifting data platform – and the Common Web Design – our web design and application framework. These two gave me a massive head-start by already doing all of the hard work such as extracting data from our directory and making the whole thing look great. Now, on with technology.

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Posted in Labs, Open Data, Projects | (1) Comment | Click here to add a comment »

Who are you?

Posted on December 7th, 2010 by Nick Jackson

Today I’ve mostly been working on the magic of our user data collector for Nucleus, an awesome bit of technology which takes our slightly slow existing method of finding user information and replacing it with one blisteringly fast one based on our ever-favourite database Mongo.

What it does is – on a regular schedule – go through the entire directory letter by letter, collect all the users, and write their details to the database. How it does this, however, is a bit smarter than a bulk import in that it actually looks to see if the user has been updated or not, and records the changes. We can then use this data to do ‘push’ updates of user information – telling services which rely on user data that something has changed as soon as we can, rather than waiting for those services to have to look for changes themselves. We can also let those services do a ‘changes pull’, asking only for those records which have changed since a particular time. All of this combines to reduce network overhead and speed up processing by only sending changed details around, rather than a massive dump of all our data.

Coming soon to Nucleus will also be the first bit of cross-service collation as we begin to include data from students such as addresses and home email addresses. Where in the past this would require querying four different services, receiving a mix of data types and needing a lot of massaging to do anything useful we’ve done the hard bit for you. Even better, instead of giving insecure access to the data by providing direct database access, or blindly dumping the information, access will be controlled using the power of OAuth, giving us fine-grained control over exactly who can see what.

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Posted in Open Data | (0) Comments | Click here to add a comment »

Let There Be Data

Posted on November 29th, 2010 by Nick Jackson

At the moment, Lincoln is standing on the edge of a huge change in the way things are done, at least as far as data is concerned. It’s been slowly pushed there by a small band of people (myself amongst them) who believe that one of the keys to making the world a better place is simply opening up data. Today it’s become clear to me that the availability of this data isn’t something that’s just wanted by an academic elite who want it ‘because it should be there’, but it’s something that’s wanted by people who just want to make things better.

Within hours of the University posting up a warning about severe weather, a Tweet dropped into my @mentions box from someone asking if there was the raw data for the warnings available. There’s already a student who’s wanting the not-yet-complete Total ReCal public timetable data for his own 3rd year project. Someone else was wanting to get hold of the GCW PC availability data. The list is endless.

So, what I’m going to try to do in some of my not-really-free time is to start the ball rolling for a website in the style of various other places around the world. Things like data.gov, data.gov.uk and data.open.ac.uk. I think data.lincoln.ac.uk should be fairly easy to rustle up. We could even use WordPress, and the whole thing is ready to go in under a day.

Who’s with me?

Posted in Open Data, Total ReCal, Web 2.0 | (1) Comment | Click here to add a comment »

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