Posted on February 26th, 2012 by Joss Winn
12 people from Lincoln attended Dev8D this year. Here’s what we contributed.
Nick and Alex helped set up the conference on the Monday night. Jamie Mahoney and I travelled down first thing Tuesday.
Journalism students, Jonathan Cresswell, Suzy Aldridge and Ollie Gibbons were three quarters of the official media team, covering the event from start to finish. They were working alongside Michelle Pauli, Deputy Editor of Guardian Books.
Computing students, Ben, Max, Peter and Alan Bage were there with John Murray, and gave lightning talks about their DIVERSE and Fast.Q projects. Peter’s talk about Fast.Q was voted the best lightning talk of the conference. Well done!
The Orbital project’s Lead Developer, Nick Jackson, continued to develop the badging system he’d started for the DevXS conference and by the end of Dev8D, people were being awarded badges for all manner of things. The badging system carries across to other DevCSI events, too, helping to build developer’s reputations among the community.
Following lots of demand, Nick also gave a lightning talk about OAuth and how we use it at Lincoln. He was also a member of the panel on data repositories.
Student and Developer in our Online Services Team, Alex Bilbie, gave a packed out introduction to HTML5 and then repeated it again to another packed out room due to high demand.
Joss, from CERD, led a session on Helping Hackers Hack, discussing his experience setting up LNCD and working with young developers. He also used Dev8D to work on his research project, which is studying the role of Hackers in higher education and how they learn their craft. Joss was also Chair of the data.*.ac.uk panel, which discussed on-going efforts by HEIs to publish open institutional data.
Nick and Alex stayed on for the weekend to attend the CodeIgniter conference and gave two very popular presentations there, too. Nick presented on API-driven development, while Alex gave an introduction to MongoDB.
Posted in Conferences | Tags: Dev8D, DevCSI, presentations, talks, workshops
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Posted on February 13th, 2012 by Joss Winn
Following on from my last post, I should also point out that Alex’s work was recently recognised by JISC’s DevCSI project. You can read their Case Study on the DevCSI blog.
DevCSI (‘Developer Community Supporting Innovation‘) is an important initiative within the developer community in higher education. Mahendra Mahey and other staff regularly run focused events where developers are able to share their experience and knowledge with each other and tackle specific problems faced by the sector in a supportive environment. Past events have included developer-focused workshops on Open Educational Resources, Accessibility, Open Research, Open Data, scientific workflows and more. DevCSI also made a major contribution to the running of our DevXS conference last November and without the experience, support and financial contribution that they made, we would not have been able to run the event. DevCSI is also important because it is trying to address difficult issues relating to staff retention, the opportunities for career progression and the broader, strategic role of Developers working in HEIs. These are important issues, not only for developers themselves, but also for project managers and senior strategic university staff.
Tomorrow, several of us from Lincoln will be attending the annual three-day Dev8D conference in London. It is one of the highlights of the year for us and we’ll be contributing by leading sessions on university open data, Helping Hackers Hack, HTML5 and Git, as well as offering lightning talks on Continuous Integration and the DIVERSE and Fast.Q projects, and participating in sessions on 3D printing, open course data, working with data produced by scientific instruments, and more.
Dev8D is effectively three packed days of specialist training and skill-sharing for developers working in HE and as with all good conferences, new ideas are developed, new strategic initiatives are born and a greater sense of sector-wide understanding and collaboration is achieved.
Thank you DevCSI!
Posted in Recognition | Tags: DevCSI, developer, students
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Posted on February 13th, 2012 by Joss Winn
This is rather belated, but I didn’t want it to go unrecognised that Alex Bilbie and Nick Jackson both received Individual Staff Merit Awards at the end of 2011. I was very pleased to contribute to the recommendation of the awards, having worked with both of them since they began working at the university as students. Here is the statement that I provided.
I have worked closely with Nick and Alex on four JISC-funded projects and am now co-ordinating a new group of technologists (LNCD) in which they are key members of staff. Needless to say, the quality of their work is excellent. What has been most impressive and satisfying working with them is the energy and enthusiasm they bring to their work. It is infectious. They are not simply young and idealistic developers, they are able to offer careful appraisals of technologies and then rapidly prototype examples for other colleagues to evaluate.
Nick and Alex have made significant progress over the last 18 months or so and have helped transform the way that our online services are developed. They have also helped bring a good deal of attention to our work at the university. They are highly regarded by colleagues at Oxford and Southampton, for example, and they are recognised as two of the ‘up and coming’ developers in the sector by JISC programme managers. This was recently evidenced at a JISC conference where Alex received an honourable mention for his work. The Programme manager said:
“I’d watch this developer closely as he will be doing truly amazing things in the coming years (if there was a newcomer award, Alex would have gotten it).”
Over the last two years we have been fortunate to win a number of grants from JISC. I can honestly say that without Nick and Alex, I would not have been in a position to write most of those bids. Having enthusiastic, knowledgeable and progressive developers is vital for improving the university’s use of technology for research, teaching and learning. It’s important that we recognise Alex and Nick’s contribution to our recent success.
Nick is now working closely with me on the Orbital project and Alex continues to work in the Online Services Team, while finishing his BSc in Computer Science. You can follow the work of them on their blogs (Alex, Nick). Congratulations, Alex and Nick.
Posted in Recognition | Tags: Alex Bilbie, awards, Nick Jackson
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Posted on December 2nd, 2011 by Joss Winn
Open Data
One of the by-products outcomes of our recent ‘proper’ projects is data.lincoln.ac.uk. This is simply a site that documents the data we are warehousing in our MongoDB datastore (called ‘Nucleus’), and the programatic methods by which we (and the public) can access that data. Most of the data is licensed for public use, but where appropriate (e.g. personal data), a secure access token must be requested. Currently, outside of our own projects, the only people needing/wanting secure access tokens are some third year computer science students who are using data.lincoln.ac.uk as the basis for their dissertation projects and require access to their own personal event data.
Our approach to publishing open data at the University of Lincoln has been to do so in a way that was immediately useful to the work we were doing. Much of the data currently available is a result of JISC-funded projects such as Total Recal and Jerome, such that we were publishers of the data in order for us to be consumers of the data. We published the data in the form that was most useful to us in our work and is likely to be useful to most other developers (students, public, whoever). Developers, Nick Jackson, Alex Bilbie and Jamie Mahoney have consequently aggregated the single largest datastore in the university and developed RESTful APIs for each dataset in order to build web applications off of that data.
This was (and remains) a sensible, pragmatic approach to working with disparate institutional data. Rather than impose ourselves on the ‘owners’ of the data (e.g. Estates, ICT, Registry, etc.) by directly calling the data from our applications, we simply warehouse the data in Nucleus, which we manage, and use that as our development platform. Over time, Nucleus is doing more than simply warehousing, but its essential role is to aggregate data from disparate sources and make it available in a way so that useful, modern web applications can be built on top of it. When Nucleus is combined with our Common Web Design (CWD) and OAuth 2.0 Single Sign On service, together with our use of CodeIgniter as a development framework, we actually have a very useful platform for rapidly developing online services at the University.
Linked Data
Over the last week, Jamie Mahoney, LNCD’s Web Developer Intern, with help from Nick Jackson, has been working on extending our data from being open, to being open and linked. Linked Data (LD) is an important development of the web, whereby information is formally stated in what is known as a ‘triple’: subject, predicate, object. Wikipedia has some simple (actually, they’re always simple) examples. Here’s one:
In the English language statement ‘New York has the postal abbreviation NY’ , ‘New York’ would be the subject, ‘has the postal abbreviation’ the predicate and ‘NY’ the object.
When information like this is serialised as data, it too can then be linked to other serialised data. Arguably, when we link data, we produce new knowledge.
Our work on data.lincoln has so far been done in the context of a number of universities (Southampton, Oxford, Cambridge, Leeds, Bristol, York…) that are starting to publish open, linked data. In some ways, we have been relatively advanced in our efforts to publish open data, but until now, we’ve made very little effort to publish truly open and linked data and have been criticised by our peers for this, too. That’s OK. As I said above, our approach so far has been consumer focused, that is, we need the data and we need it now!
Thankfully, the production of open, linked data is a fairly trivial task, as we’ve found this past week. Since we have a data store that contains serialised data in JSON format, Jamie and Nick have been able to quickly convert that into RDF, which is the Linked Data ‘gold standard’ format. There are tools which make it fairly easy to publish LD in the preferred RDF/XML format, using recognised ontologies. Over the past few days, we’ve created a ‘triple store’ which now contains our building data, our people data and our blogs data. There’s more to do, when we have time, but we’ve made the move to providing Linked Data and contributing open institutional data to the semantic web.
So what?
So, where do we go from here? What does a platform for open, linked data really offer anybody?
Before we look at our own work, I think the work of the University of Southampton offers an answer to this question. They have a large number of datasets available and a well documented website, which also documents the applications that use their data. Their Amenity map is a really nice example of data that is linked and presented in a useful application. If you visit the site and search for ‘toast’, it shows you which catering spot on campus offers (beans on) toast and when it’s open. It links menu item data, with location data. In all, the map uses six different sources of linked data, which is available for anyone to develop with. Staff and students with the skills can write their own applications, but also local businesses could use the data, too. It contributes not only to the academic community but the local community.
When lots of universities publish data like this it not only benefits their staff and students and local community, but the higher eduction sector, too. Building, energy and course data are nice examples.
Building energy use over 24hrs. Red = more, Green = less
What if we could take all the campus energy and location data across the sector and examine the energy use by the area of each building? It would help us identify the attributes that make a space use more or less energy per m2. When combined with course data it might also help institutions re-configure their own timetabling of space, too. We could examine which disciplines use more or less energy by their use of space. We can already guess that the STEM disciplines use more energy than the Humanities but what else might we learn from having access to structured energy, building and course data across the sector? For the University of Lincoln, I’m hoping we can undertake exactly this investigation next year, during Stage Two of JISC’s Course Data programme, when we’ll be making our course data open. We already have open building and (thanks, LiSC) energy data.
Making our data open and now linked can produce tangible benefits to the institution and to the sector, as our Total Recal and Jerome projects have demonstrated. An application I use several times a day is our new staff directory. Having people data available to us in this way will allow us to quickly integrate it into our new Orbital system for managing research data. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time. We don’t need to hold multiple instances of staff information across different applications. Nucleus serves it all in the formats we need.
Chris Gutteridge at Southampton posted recently about the Return on Investment of making data open. He argues that in addition to improved Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), publishing open data provides an incentive to create small, useful applications that serve a local or timely need. You’ll see that he demonstrates this using Soton’s, Oxford’s and Lincoln’s building data. You’ll see below that he’s created a look up service for our buildings.
Search for a space at the University of Lincoln and click for more details and this then takes you through to Nick’s ‘Spaces at Lincoln’ site, which provides links to book the space or request maintenance or security. It wouldn’t take much to add timetable data to this to find out if the room is currently in use or when it is next free. Our new My Calendar (Total Recal) application will be a way into this information, too.
What Next?
Jamie has recently added our public blog data to Nucleus and made that available via APIs and (as yet undocumented) RDF/XML Linked Data. I hope that one of our Computer Science colleagues might do some content analysis on it to identify themes across disciplines. As I said above, I also hope that we’ll be starting Stage Two of our Course Data project in January when we’ll pull structured course data (XCRI-CAP) into Nucleus and make it available over APIs and as RDF/XML. With that, we’ll be developing applications to demonstrate what can be done when course data is combined with other institutional data, as well as fun (and useful) visualisations that show staff and students what courses are being taught and where, in real time.
Two third-year Computing students are also working on applications which use our data, too. One focuses on personal (non-open!) student attendance data, where the developer will prototype an app for students to monitor their own attendance. Academic staff will be able to see attendance of a course by aggregate and use this as an alert if attendance dips. The second focuses on prototyping an application for new students to help integrate them into the university, using both our own data and third-party APIs, such as Facebook. Neither of these dissertation projects are likely to get much beyond the proof of concept stage, but by making our data available to students, we’re not only providing them with data, but also a learning environment where we collaboratively work through the issues their projects raise, learning from each other and, over time, attracting ideas about how to innovate around our data for the benefit of staff and students.
Going further than this, Dr. John Murray’s DIVERSE project is using Nucleus, OAuth and our URL proxy/shortener to rapidly integrate their JISC-funded e-learning project into the university’s technical infrastructure. Ben and Max, the two MRes students who are working on the project, were able to quickly leverage the work we’d done to develop their application in time for the start of the academic year and are now responding to feedback from students using the tool in their class.
Getting students involved in the re-imagination and re-creation of the university, was also the theme of our recent DevXS conference, where around 180 students and 20 mentors from over 30 universities worked together to build applications that ‘improve, challenge and positively disrupt university life’. It was a fantastic event (I think everyone agreed) and some teams of students used our bibliographic and location data to prototype applications.
Team MCR's Library app
The Roominator
Our Orbital project, though not strictly an open data project, will provide a simple method for our researchers to openly license and make their research data publicly available. It’s a bit early to say yet, but it’s likely that Orbital will extend Nucleus as well as re-use some of what we’ve learned about Authentication and API-based development of web services. As a pilot project with the School of Engineering, there’s a focus on security and the provenance of data, but equally we’ll ensure that when data can or is mandated to be publicly available, it will be accessible via both Developer-friendly APIs and form part of our overall Linked Data provision as RDF/XML. I am sure that the university’s research data that is made open through Orbital will contribute to data.lincoln.ac.uk becoming a platform for further cross-disciplinary research, innovation and online service development.
Posted in Context, Experiments, Projects | Tags: data, DevXS, DIVERSE, JSON, Linked Data, Nucleus, open data, Orbital, RDF, semantic web, Student as Producer
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Posted on November 3rd, 2011 by Joss Winn
Jamie has been working on various ways to usefully visualise the university’s open energy data, which is an outcome of Derek’s work in the Lincoln Social Computing Research Centre. A while back, we pulled the data into data.lincoln.ac.uk and it’s great to see how it might be used by different people in the university. There’s a growing amount of interest in the ways that energy data is communicated to help reduce our energy consumption.
It’s not easy to first make sense of the data but then also articulate it in ways that sustain the reduction in consumption we might be looking for. Personally, I think it requires a number of methods and different visualisations to communicate this as well as changes in policy and incentives, too. There’s no easy fix. I was involved in Open to Change, a JISC-funded project on the design, use and value of energy Dashboards, led by the University of Oxford. If you’re interested in this subject, I recommend visiting the project website as well as learning more about LiSC’s research in this area, too.
In the meantime, here’s Jamie’s recent blog post on his work and here’s his development site.
Posted in Experiments | Tags: dashboards, energy, Experiments, jmahoney, mashups, visualisation
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Posted on September 5th, 2011 by Joss Winn
What is DevXS?
DevXS is a BarCamp / Hackathon – style conference that recognises the progressive ideas and talent that students can bring to the development of higher education services. At the core of DevXS is a two-day developer marathon, where students from across the UK and beyond are encouraged to team up and build cool things that contribute to university life. It’s about students sharing their ideas, mashing up data and building prototypes that improve, challenge and positively disrupt the research, teaching and learning landscapes of further and higher education. Prizes will be awarded to the best ideas, prototypes and collaborations. DevXS builds on the success of the JISC funded Developer Community Supporting Innovation (DevCSI) project and events that it runs, such as the annual Dev8D conference.
Who is organising DevXS?
DevXS is organised jointly by LNCD and the JISC-funded DevCSI project, run by UKOLN at the University of Bath. It began as an idea of Nick Jackson and Alex Bilbie, two students at the University of Lincoln who now work in the University’s Online Services Team.
What is DevXS for?
There is a real opportunity to engage with the energy of those working in ‘social technology’ to develop new ideas and resources. Individual institutions could run events and become engaged with communities of developers. The Edgeless University, 2009.
The objectives of DevXS are similar to Dev8D, Rewired State and other BarCamp / Hackathon type conferences. DevXS is a continuous 30hr ‘hack day’, “a pressure cooker for innovation — an intensified period of Research and Development that months of traditional work could not replicate.” It’s intended to provide space, support, incentives and stimulation to students who want to be more than just consumers of university services and build cool tools that make further and higher educational institutions better, learn something in the process and meet other like-minded students across the UK.
DevXS is a response to what The Edgeless University report called a “time of maximum uncertainty and time for creative possibility between the ending of the way things have been and the beginning of the way they will be.” At a time when the higher education sector is is undergoing significant change and students are increasingly expected to assume the role of consumer, Student as Producer encourages students to challenge this role through a critical engagement with their social world, where they are encouraged and supported to become more than just student-consumers during their course of research and study. DevXS is a disruptive learning experience, a pedagogical intervention for students who want to do cool stuff with the web that challenges the traditional institutions of learning.
Who should attend?
DevXS is open to undergraduate and post-graduate students across the UK and beyond. It’s a conference that’s principally aimed at student web developers, computer science geeks and journalism/media students who are increasingly expected to engage with data on the web. You don’t have to have programming skills to attend, but you should be enthusiastic about working with developers by sharing ideas, pulling together data from various sources and working collaboratively to solve one or more of a number of challenges which will be announced before the start of DevXS.
Visit the DevXS website to register and for more information!
Posted in Announcements | Tags: barcamp, conference, development, DevXS, hackathon, hacking, mashups, Student as Producer, students
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