Room Features updated
by Ash Smith
Over the last few weeks, Patrick has been exploring the university’s central data store looking for information on rooms and the features they contain. We’ve always had room features on data.southampton.ac.uk, but they were all generated from a single XML file given to Chris some years ago, and things change over time. So thanks to Pat’s fearless efforts investigating the central Oracle database, we now have a couple of scripts to pull not only room features, but booking information as well. A quick RDF generation script from me later, and we now have a method of ensuring the open data is as up to date as the university’s central database.
This is quite a big deal in my opinion – anyone planning a lecture or event can now view room information from the web and work out which rooms are suitable and available at the required time without having to phone Estates or walk across campus in the rain. Also, updating our data after such a long time is interesting for noting how things change over time; if nothing else, audio/visual technology is improving while chalk blackboards are definitely getting rarer!