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Launch Monday!
by Christopher Gutteridge
We’ve just crossed over to midnight and the site is looking pretty darn linked. We’ll open it to the public once the final bits have been checked tomorrow.
The data.southampton team have produced a few initial applications for the data, plus so have a few of our students, but this is just the start. I can’t wait to see what happens next.
This was lots of hard work trailblazing how to set the site up, but all our code is available! If you wanted to just make an RDF document describing buildings or a phonebook we’ve got some nice scripts which turn simple spreadsheets into linked data! I’ve just imported a sheet of recycling points from around the university, and that’s the last thing for today.
One thing we’ve not yet really done is shown how much goes on under the hood.
If you want to explore the data, swapping the .html in the address bar for .xml, .rdf and .json will often give some data. This data is all rather free-range right now, but we’ll progressively improve the site as we learn.
Welcome to the Data Blog
by Christopher Gutteridge
Welcome to the University of Southampton Data Blog. We will use this blog to update you on new features of the data site, cool things people have done with the data and so forth.
The techie details about how the site works and the different technologies involved will be posted to our Web Team blog.
Right now we’re about 60 hours from Data-Day, which is March 7th.
After launch we’ll continue to add datasets. There are datasets we have approval to publish but there are just not enough hours in the day! Datasets which are planned to follow in due course include
- Building energy use data (we have a great metering system)
- What software is installed on workstation clusters and desktop machines of each academic unit
- Menus from the staff club
- Mapping from Programme of Study to individual modules
In the longer term we also hope to look into giving people the ability to access their personal data (timetables specifically), and more importantly authorise apps to have access to that data. See this blog post for some earlier thoughts on this concept.
The photgraphs of many of our main buildings were provided by a student, under a CC-BY license. This means anyone in the University, or beyond, can freely use them so long as they credit the artist. We don’t have photos of the more far flung or obscure buildings, but the student photographic society have taken that as a challenge and we look forward to seeing what they come up with.