Category: Open Data

The Power of Open Policy

Nick Jackson / / Open Data, Service 2.0, User Experience

One of the outcomes from the Orbital project that I’m part of is a set of new policies on the subject of research data management. Early on it was decided that this would – in the spirit of open research – be made available under an open licence along with the rest of our resources on the subject (such as training and support materials).

Being the technically minded folk that we are, we wanted to make sure that several of us could work on documentation at the same time without running the risk of overwiting each others changes. We also wanted a comprehensive versioning system to be in place from us putting the first words into the keyboard so that we could see every single change and who made it, something that we think is a big part of making a resource truly open. Finally, we also wanted a mechanism which could allow other people indirectly connected to the project to propose changes. Given our history of using similar systems to manage code there was an obvious choice – the Git source control system.

Git is a system which primarily relies on tracking line-by-line changes, meaning that when we wrote stuff we’d want to use a file format which behaved on a line-by-line basis. This made compiled binary formats such as Microsoft Word or even PDF a bit unsuitable, since a small change could result in a huge set of changes spanning hundreds (or more) of lines. We also wanted to use an open standard which didn’t have prohibitive licence restrictions and which was simple enough to be read and understood by anybody with a basic text editor. There are quite a few standards out there which meet this requirement, but again based on past experience we’re using Markdown for our RDM Policy.

Finally, inspired in no small way by the efforts of the Bundestag to convert their entire body of law to Git we wanted to store policy on a platform which not just allowed community involvement, but which positively encouraged it. GitHub is the world’s largest repository of open development, covering every language under the sun and projects ranging from hardcore low level programming through writing documentation through to communal story writing. Even better, they provide free hosting space for open projects. We already had a University of Lincoln user kicking around from past work, so it was a logical place to stick our Git repository. If you’re interested you can take a look at what we’ve got.

What’s interesting about using open text-based standards to write policy, Git for managing revisions and GitHub as a storage provider is that we’ve inadvertently made it very easy for people to do things that they couldn’t do before.

Continue reading “The Power of Open Policy”

One small step.

Nick Jackson / / Open Data

Today we shipped the latest version (v3) of our Staff Directory. This is the most heavily used of the LNCD creations, underpinning public profiles for staff members as well as helping to build parts of the corporate website.

Today’s release brings a new look to profile pages, based on feedback from the past few months of operation. It also brings with it a brand new profile editor, replacing the editor on our Blogs platform. The new editor helps staff complete their profiles in a much more structured way, with more robust validation, meaning that when we re-expose the data to the world it’s significantly cleaner. This new data is responsible for the biggest change yet to how Directory works.

Previously the Directory gleaned all of its data from various sources around the University, then did some work to tidy it up as best we could before presenting it. Instead Directory now takes its information exclusively from our Nucleus data platform, and when people edit their profile the changes are written back into Nucleus. Coupled with the newly structured data this allows us to build a very powerful web of knowledge which gives us insights in previously impossible ways. This is our first step to making Nucleus more than just a collection of data gleaned from elsewhere, making it the only source of some information. Over the coming months we plan to move more stuff to having Nucleus as its primary source (specifically information around research projects, and supplementary Estates information used for geolocation).

If you’re interested in taking a look at the data behind Staff Directory, check out the people catalogue on Data.Lincoln.

Data, data everywhere…

Nick Jackson / / Open Data

Data Monster

I’m very pleased to announce that after quite a while being tinkered with, our brand new (and shiny) version of Data.Lincoln is ready to rock and provide you with open (for the most part) institutional data. To start with we’re really pleased to give you some of our estates data, our staff phone book and an institutional profile as fully open, linked data. We’re also making it easier to find the University’s published documents (unfortunately not yet available as raw data) such as our financial returns and not-yet-openly-licenced course data, as well as doing our best to get this data released in better formats.

We’re still working on cracking open more data, and have meetings lined up with various parts of the University to try and make this happen faster. In the meantime we’re working on building even more reliable data pathways from the source of the data through our Nucleus data platform and out onto Data.Lincoln.

For now, why not grab some data and have a play? Just remember to follow the licence restrictions where they exist.

Data-driven. Iterative. Awesome.

Nick Jackson / / DIrectory, Labs, Open Data, User Experience

If you’re a member of staff at the University you will soon be hearing loads more about the Directory, the planned replacement for the University’s phone search system and staff profiles.

Whilst the Directory itself is rather cool, how it’s been built is of somewhat more interest. First of all, it’s driven entirely by data from other sources. The Directory itself doesn’t store any data at all, save for a search index. This means that unlike the old staff profiles on the corporate website it helps to expose bad data where it exists — since we soft-launched the Directory we’ve been barraged by requests from people to ‘fix their profile’, when in fact the thing that needs ‘fixing’ often lies at a far higher level. In some cases it’s literally been a case of people having misspelt job titles in the University’s HR system for years, data which is now corrected. This whole cycle of exposing bad data and not attempting to automatically or manually patch it up at the Directory end helps lead the University to have better data as a whole, making lives easier and people happier.

Secondly, the Directory is a perfect example of why iterative development rocks. The very first version of the Directory arrived over a year ago, and since then has been improved to include semantic markup, a new look, faster searching, staff profiles, more data sources, open data output formats and more. Over the last couple of weeks as it’s started to be integrated with the corporate website it’s been subject to even more refining, fixing formatting, typos, incorrect data and more. These changes happen quickly – a new version is released with minor changes almost daily – and are driven almost exclusively by real users getting in touch and telling us what they think needs doing.

The upshot of doing things this way, harnessing data that already exists and letting people feed back as quickly as possible, leads to products and services which reach a usable state far faster, are a closer match to user requirements, and help to improve other systems which are connected or exist in the same data ecosystem.

Told you it was awesome.

Dev8D is here again…

Nick Jackson / / Open Data, Stuff Which Doesn't Live Anywhere Else, Web 2.0

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!

Directory Data

Nick Jackson / / DIrectory, Open Data, Orbital

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.

Continue reading “Directory Data”

All About You

Nick Jackson / / Open Data, User Experience, Web 2.0

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.

Continue reading “All About You”

Delicious tea…

Nick Jackson / / Open Data

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.

Where are you?

Nick Jackson / / Open Data

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.

Student as Producer, meet Nucleus

Nick Jackson / / Nucleus, Open Data

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!