More Little Wins
by Ash Smith
It was recently pointed out to us here in Open Data HQ that we don’t blog enough. We do a lot of things but most of them are little wins and not worth their own blog post. However, we’ve had enough little wins recently that it’s worth writing a paragraph or two about all of them.
Public People IDs
We have always had a few datasets containing information about people. The ePrints dataset, the public phonebook and, more recently, the facilities data all contain people triples. Sadly none of them linked up. This obviously troubled me.
We’ve always been a little timid around personal data. It’s a tough area – one wrong move and you’ll never live it down. Some businesses have been forced to close down due to poor management of personal data. Also, what some might consider acceptable some may not. I notice trends around the University – for example, most people in WAIS already have a public ‘people’ page, containing their email address, their degree and maybe a few other things, and see no wrong in it at all. Researchers actually need a public identity on their institutional website, it’s the way they communicate with other researchers and increase their reputation. But if I were to tell the groundskeeper or the staff in catering that their email addresses and photos are all going to be made public, they would probably be quite strongly opposed to the idea, and quite rightly so. I have no right to publish their personal information without their permission, and certainly not as open data.
We believe we have a compromise. We’ve assigned everyone in the University a URI, but that’s it. Occasionally these URIs resolve to something other than a blank page, but this only currently happens if (a) they have explicitly agreed to be in the public phonebook, (b) are the contact for a piece of equipment in our equipment database, or (c) I’ve added a bunch of information just for laughs (see http://data.southampton.ac.uk/person/D5mY.html for an example.) Even these pages are not visible to Google, and they are not centrally linked from anywhere so you can’t just scrape all the public people (unless you use the SPARQL endpoint I guess). But the point is that even people who have given us permission to publish their information are quite well hidden from Bad People™, and nobody else is public at all, even though we can refer to them in other datasets if we need to. I’m working with the team responsible for the recent main website re-brand, so I’ll link all this in with actual departmental people pages when I can. The main point is that everyone has a URI now, and these URIs are completely obfuscated and non-sequential, and (externally, at least) there is absolutely nothing you can do with them unless the person to which it refers is OK with their data being public. But we can use them to refer to people, and you can be sure the person referred to within one dataset is the same person being referred to by another.
An interesting quirk we encountered (hopefully before it caused any problems!) was what we lovingly refer to as the ‘four letter word problem’. The URIs referring to people were created by generating random numbers starting at over a million (so nobody gets to be ‘number 1’) and then base64-encoding them. The result is a four-digit alphanumeric string which means nothing, and this gets added to the URI. Someone pointed out to us that we run the risk of accidentally generating something along the lines of ‘D0rk’, and the poor person who gets assigned this ID won’t be too happy. Realising there are other (often far worse) four-letter words that might be accidentally generated, we found a digital copy of the dictionary and cross-checked every ID we’d generated and re-generated it if it was a dictionary word. Now whenever we generate a new ID, for a new member of staff, we check against a dictionary before ‘releasing’ the URI into the wild.
Waste Map
http://tools.southampton.ac.uk/waste-map/
This is an embeddable map of all the waste points on our many campuses. It’s particularly useful for people living in halls of residence, but is also used by Estates and Facilities when working with external contractors.
Nightingale Foyer Report
In the Nightingale building foyer there is a little touch-screen display from which anyone can look up the people who work in that building. The data comes from the Open Data Service, but we had to build a custom version of the data because of the embedded staff from professional services who also work in the building alongside the Nursing and Midwifery staff.
Room Shapes and Divisions
You will almost certainly have seen our lovely digital map, for which I am eternally grateful to Christopher Baines. It uses data from Open Street Map and our own open data, but in many cases where data does not exist, Chris went and created it anyway. The best example of this are the room shapes. Zoom in as far as you can on the map and the building shapes will open up into partial floor plans. We are actually not allowed to publish full floor plans for security reasons, but publicly accessible rooms are fair game. I’m currently working on a more maintainable version of the map, so I’ve taken the opportunity to convert all of Chris’ lovely polygons into an RDF description and published them as a dataset.
Additionally, I was asked a long time ago by one of the lab managers in Building 32 if the bays had URIs. The whole of levels 3 and 4 of Building 32 make up a big open plan lab area for Web Scientists, and this is split into bays of four to six people. At the time the bays didn’t have any URIs but I figured that because I’m the University’s only Linked Open Data specialist, it’s probably my job to assign them! So I did, and built a dataset describing their physical position within the lab.
ATMs
We’ve always had a list of ATMs on campus as part of the Amenities dataset, but that’s as far as it goes. A colleague of ours, Martin Chivers, suggested we include the location of all the ATMs in Southampton, and that the information is all available from various websites already. A few hours of googling added to my own personal knowledge and we now have a spreadsheet of ATM points for the central Southampton and Highfield areas. I’ll try to keep it up to date but the amenities dataset is manually maintained so I apologise if I miss one or two. Looking to the future, I believe we can keep this up to date automatically using Open Street Map, although this is basically crowd-sourced data and we’d like something better. The Link website actually contains a search engine for ATMs in Southampton, but this is almost certainly not open data and we have no right to republish it. So this remains an ongoing project.
Open Day Events
We’ve had lists of open day events before, but this year someone has already gone through the hassle of entering them all into our mobile app, MySouthampton. One Android phone and a copy of WireShark later and I’ve worked out where it gets its data and mercilessly stolen it! This of course means that the open data is up-to-date as long as MySouthampton is. I’ve described the events in the same way as we currently do seminars, etc, so you can always tell when it’s open day because suddenly all the buildings pages have enormous lists of events.