data.ac.uk
by Christopher Gutteridge
data.ac.uk launched today. It will provide a hub for linked data in .ac.uk open data services, and aggregate open data from UK academia. It’s been set up by the data.southampton team, but it’s owned by the community of .ac.uk open data services.
Our equipment dataset is now aggregated by equipment.data.ac.uk and there is a nifty search.
New Feature! The Room Finder
by Ash Smith
We now have a tool that allows anyone in the University to find a suitable room for their event. We call it the Room Finder and I for one am rather proud of it. The tool pulls data from the places dataset, the room features dataset and the new room bookings dataset, and is a really simple way of finding a room at the University of Southampton. Let’s say, for example, that you need a room for a lunchtime meeting on Friday somewhere on Highfield Campus – and by the way, the room must contain a data projector and a piano. Using the Room Finder, you can check to see if such a room is available at the time you need and, if so, click through to the room description pages to find out more. The tool doesn’t currently allow you to actually book the room, but it’s hoped that many phone calls to Estates and/or the central booking service can now be avoided as we continue our ongoing mission to get all the University’s useful data onto the web.
The Room Finder is still under development, so things will change in the coming days. Specifically, I’m not completely happy with the way it displays the features list, it’s still a little bit more technical than it needs to be. We’re also hoping to get a mobile version out soon, it’s a bit fiddly trying to use it on a small screen. But as with everything on this site, I hope it shows just how useful open data can be. If you do find a problem with it, have a request for an additional feature or just find it useful and want to let me know, then feel free to drop me an email at ads04r@ecs.soton.ac.uk.