Category: Open Data

The Roadmap

Nick Jackson / / CWD, Get Satisfaction, Labs, lncn.eu, LUNA, Open Data, Posters, Print From My PC

Just to keep you up to date, here’s what’s planned to be happening on a few projects we’ve got kicking around over the summer. This is in addition to some other big ones we’re working on like Project Jerome (a brand new way of interfacing with the Library systems) and online postgraduate applications.

Authentication

  • Completion of our OAuth 2.0 interface for login.
  • Application Directory to handle issuing of API keys, secrets and tokens.
  • Taking a closer look at seamless SSO.
  • Adding the ability to use University usernames and passwords at Get Satisfaction.

Linking You

  • Administration interface.
  • Even faster.
  • Improved statistics.
  • Link checker (monitors for broken links and notifies accordingly).
  • Support for custom minified keywords.
  • Support for alterable destinations using 307 redirects instead of 301.
  • Improved metadata & thumbnail gathering.
  • Warnings for potentially unsafe or unsuitable destinations (to stop link masking).
  • Support for web hooks.
  • Membership of 301Works.

A-Z

  • Admin interface.
  • Link checker (monitors for broken links and alters lists accordingly).
  • Highlighting of links requiring login.
  • Support for even more export formats (CSV, XBEL and XML) on top of JSON.

LUNA (Network Access for Student Village & Riseholme Park)

  • Updating the design to the CWD.
  • Faster.
  • Removing dependence on JavaScript.

Posters

  • Going live on the production network, ready for its shakedown in the public eye over the summer.

Common Web Design

  • Even more blisteringly fast.
  • Lots of behind-the-scenes goodness to get it looking even better on older browsers and Internet Explorer.
  • Unicorns.
  • Various tweaks and fixes.
  • Custom styling for even more elements of the page so you don’t have to.
  • Moving to a new domain name and production server so we can roll it out to even more sites.

Printing

  • Better compatibility with more operating systems (hopefully).
  • Colour printing support.
  • Integration of Pay For Print, so everything is in one place.

A is for Accommodation…

Nick Jackson / / Labs, Open Data

During a bit of a bored moment I decided that I needed some way of organising the myriad collection of websites the University has under its belt into something we can navigate around.

My starting point was the University’s current A-Z on the corporate website, which contains several oddities and duplicates but nonetheless does list a lot of bits of the University. However, I wanted to create something a bit more useful than a straight list of links – anybody can cobble together a <ul> of items and manually sort it, but it takes a bit more trickery to do what I had planned.

Long story short, I’ve built up a brand-new A-Z service (currently in Labs). This is still not quite finished as I need to get the administrative side working (for which I need our SSO service available, hopefully next week) and as such the data isn’t quite fully loaded. However, a few awesome things I feel I should point out:

  • It supports multiple lists of A-Z (try the menu items on the site), and each link can be in as many lists as it wants. When a link changes it is updated once and the change ripples out automatically.
  • It’s blazingly fast, and supports heavy-duty caching to make it even more so in production.
  • It supports machine-readable output on any list, for example this JSON version of the home list. CSV is coming soon.
  • Lists can be either automatically sorted into A-Z (as on the home page) or arbitrarily by the list creator (as shown in this example for Gateway), with unique display styles for each flavour.
  • A-Z sorted lists are split automatically into blocks of letters when viewed as HTML (ie in a browser, not the machine-readable version). If a block would be too small, it automatically runs blocks together. The threshold for a block being ‘too small’ is determined automatically based on the number of items in the list, to prevent there being too many blocks in the menu.

This new A-Z service already has interest from the Library, who may find it an easier way to manage their myriad of links to services. It’s also already found use in another side-project, the new-look Gateway. This is the same Gateway you all know and love, just made über fast and sporting improved cross-platform compatibility by the power of the CWD. The list of links is imported from the A-Z service so it can be easily managed without resorting to asking Online Services nicely or hacking your way through the Portal. Planned future developments around this may include a customisable ‘springboard’ of links for each person… but more on that later.

Posters, CWD and more!

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

Last week I headed off to a conference in London called Dev8D, where I met a few hundred other developers from the HE sector (and others) and spent my time brainstorming ideas, messing about with RFID tags, mashing data together, attending workshops on the future of data representation, writing an iPhone app, learning to use the Force, drinking far too much complementary tea and coffee and fighting the mess that is the Underground on a weekend. In short, it was awesome fun. Out of it I’ve gleaned loads of useful bits and pieces which I can now use to push the bits of the University that I can get my hands on into the future with impunity, because somebody else has already done the research and I now know who.

Next up, Posters. We’re still waiting for our new development server on which the Online Services Team can develop, stage, test and show off our latest inventions. Once that’s up and running you’ll be able to have a go at breaking it and we’ll be open for feedback. Posters will also be the first production University site (albeit beta) to use our new CWD 2.0, and will also be providing data as RSS in the initial release, with JSON and XML further down the line. The ability for groups such as student societies to add posters, along with a streamlined online approval process, will be in place ready for once Posters leaves beta.

Continue reading “Posters, CWD and more!”

Searching The University

Nick Jackson / / Open Data, Web 2.0

Part of my remit as one of the Online Service Team’s tame students is to take time now and then to step back, look at things, and work out how they could be made all-around better. An example of this has been the slow but steady march towards a common, uniform, standards-compliant styling for every web service.

All my rambling aside, I spotted a brilliant post from the BBC Internet Blog on searching the BBC. In short, their new Search+ trawls the entire BBC looking for what you’re after, and then decides what’s most relevant within context. Data representation and organisation is a big area of interest for me (the Cybernetics part of my degree has a huge focus on knowledge representation), and searching is an area in which the University, to put it bluntly, sucks.

Bits and pieces work on their own, for example the Library Catalogue searches the library fairly well, and the Phone Search tends to find who you’re looking for. Blogs has a search, although it does skim over a few things. There’s also Portal, which has a search function which alternates between sometimes giving you something relevant and sometimes picking random, outdated and irrelevant content from 5 years ago.

What’s needed is something a bit like the Awesome Bar in Firefox, simultaneously looking at a myriad of sources to find something relevant and presenting it to the user. In short, a single box in which you could type “Portal” and find the Portal, or “Nick Jackson” and find my directory entry, or “Somerville” and find his book on software engineering, or “help” and be taken to our support pages. Something which simultaneously scrubs across any data source we care to let it at, returning data as fast as possible.

Thoughts? Opinions? Do you want a single ‘search the University’ box with options to narrow your search, or would you prefer to have to start by specifying what you’re after?

When The Email Goes Dark…

Nick Jackson / / Open Data, Service 2.0, Web 2.0

Update regarding the state of emails: I’ve not heard official words from IT on the state of play of the email server, however my account (which was out yesterday) is now back in action. I’m guessing this is a good thing.

Today, along with 1/3 of the other staff and students at Lincoln, I’ve been devoid of emails. This is down to a problem with one of the three email stores at the University, and includes staff accounts beginning with letters A, B, M-O and V-Z along with a third of student accounts (pretty much at random). People are working on fixing it. You can keep up to date with it on Get Satisfaction.

Oddly enough this has let me spend a couple of hours working on stuff without being distracted by people asking silly questions. Instead I’ve been looking at the user interface tweaks necessary to encompass some changes to the student halls network access controller, and thinking more about the dream of a common design and components for web services.

Put simply myself (along with my partner in crime, Alex) have been throwing ideas backwards and forwards for a couple of weeks now on the subject of a single coherent way into all of Lincoln’s web services, inventively dubbed my.lincoln. The idea is of a single website which collects and collates everything you might need to know from the myriad of services as well as letting you fine-tune how they work for you.

The current 'gateway' style used by Online Services.
The current ‘gateway’ style used by Online Services.

As a part of this (once I’d beaten another kink out of how Vista behaves with PFMPC ((Print From My PC))) I began mucking around with some CSS, aiming to throw together a layout based on something Alex mocked up. The old ‘gateway’ style in use in several places is actually quite messy behind the scenes, is extraordinarily narrow, and doesn’t provide much flexibility. You can put buttons at the top, and then a load of text.

There is also a ‘new gateway’ style which I knocked out for PFMPC which fundamentally looks the same (or at least very similar) but which is completely standards compliant with the exception of some little bits of CSS. However, this still has the problems of being narrow, a bit dull, and lacking in anything which makes you go “wow, this is a great, well designed web service”.

Which is why Alex and myself decided a change was needed. Something wider, faster, cleaner, smarter, more flexible, more appealing, ready for Web 2.0, ready for single-sign-on, accessible, standards-compliant and ready for use in every browser we could think of (including Lynx, and even including IE6). We’ve nicknamed it the “Common Web Design” in the vague hopes that the name will explain what it should be used for and people can latch on to the idea.

The very first version of the CWD.
The very first version of the CWD.

Along with this will come a set of guidelines on how to write content for the CWD so that everything clicks together nicely. The whole thing is specifically designed to be portable between services (perhaps using the c.lincoln.ac.uk storage location for CSS, images and JavaScript). More importantly I feel that the CWD is a deliberate disconnect from the old look and feel. Things using the design won’t be a re-hash of the old systems with the same quirks, they will be ground-up redesigns with goals of ease-of-use and interoperability explicitly in mind.

This is very much a work in progress and probably won’t ever be seen in the wild, but we can hope. Ideally I’d like to get the design finished and roll it out for PFMPC and LUNA to help spread the message that ‘things are changing’, but since I’ve mostly done this in my own time and off my own back I may surprise people.

More on iCal

Nick Jackson / / Open Data, Web 2.0

It has been brought to my attention that I need to point out some extra information regarding my post about iCal timetables, specifically this bit:

Which is why I’m happy to announce that a Level 2 Computing student has undertaken the monumentally complex task of taking your University timetable and turning it into an iCal format. The monumentally complex task which people assured me was technically very difficult due to the way timetabling was organised.

As Tim has rightly pointed out, the “monumentally complex task” of extracting the data has already been done in order to view your timetables at all, given that the data comes out of the timetabling system in somewhat of a mess.

So, kudos to Alex for hacking the data into iCal format, but equally kudos to those who managed to get it into HTML in the first place.

In future though, I would like to see more data being available in the open format (JSON, XML, REST and those other data exchange acronyms… just preferably not SOAP) and then being re-interpreted according to how it’s meant to be viewed. Ideally the data should flow from timetabling to the data repository, and then be extracted and reformatted into the HTML view. One definitive, authoritative source for the data.

Why Sharing Data is a Good Thing™

Nick Jackson / / Open Data, Web 2.0

One of the things I’m very big on is open data. Not necessarily just broadcasting everything to the universe for all to see (which would be stupid), but instead offering data in a format which is machine readable by design, and which can be easily taken, manipulated, shared, mashed and displayed as the user wants to see it and not as the company decides it should be consumed (although providing a ‘default’ view for users not savvy with open data is acceptable and indeed encouraged).

Which is why I’m happy to announce that a Level 2 Computing student has undertaken the monumentally complex task of taking your University timetable and turning it into an iCal format. The monumentally complex task which people assured me was technically very difficult due to the way timetabling was organised. The nigh on impossible challenge of extracting data and presenting it in a new format. The arduous task which took Alex an hour of tinkering in PHP, without so much as access to the raw data.

If you’re interested in getting your timetable in a format you can use on many devices, head off to Friendly Student Timetables (beta) at Learning Lab. Source code available.