Cool code: EPrints export plug in allows preview magic
Developer Happiness Days has seen a number of immediate and exciting ouputs from the industrious coders here. While Sam Easterby-Smith’s Happier Pipe is arguably the most fun, Chris Gutteridge’s speedy work on JSON exports for the EPrints software should have a real impact on the ease of use of the popular EPrints service. Chris explains:
“I have built an export plugin for the EPrints software - http://eprints.org/software/ - which allows records and searches to be dumped as JSON. This will allow other Dev8D delegates to built new tools on top of this data.”
JSON makes it much easier to use your data in mashups on third party sites. Examples already demoed at dev8D include a third party website which allows users to browse the data in a new, faceted way, and a little code to add to the top of a webpage, which makes previews magically appear on each eprint link. Try hovering the mouse over links on
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/people/lac/publications
To access EPrint records as JSON, either perform a search on http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ and select the export as JSON option; or as a “REST” URL for record 15818:
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cgi/export/15818/JSON/ecs-eprint-15818.js
or, Chris has dumped all the data at http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/dump.json (warning: 35 Meg)
There is also a YAML version.
Video: the lighter, crumblier side of dev8D
If dev8D were a biscuit, would it be a Bourbon, a smashed-up McVitie’s Caramel, or a moist home-baked cookie? Find out the answers to these, and other pressing questions, in Julian Cheal’s series of short video interviews with members of the dev8D community.
Stuart Lamur | David Flanders | Andy McGregor | Matthew Taylor | Marcus Ramsden | Chris Gutteridge
Five minute interview: Alex Wade
Who are you?
Alex Wade, research programme manager with Microsoft
What are your areas of interest?
General areas of scholarly communication and the broad areas of information retrieval, and now my team at Microsoft is looking at doing substantial things in the repository space and the authoring space and collaboration space. I also enjoy getting out into the mountains and backpacking with my family – I have two-year-old twins so the opportunities are few and far between now.
What idea are you working on here?
We have a lot of projects that touch on this space so we are looking for connection to other projects and where we should be looking next. Specifically, we had a nice meeting yesterday morning about making it easy for authors to submit to repositories from within Word using the SWORD protocol. Today we’ll be talking about our repository platform.
What’s the major challenge in education software right now?
I think an interesting challenge is how to find the right blend between commercial software and open source software in a way that is flexible and extensible and useable by the institution. We are trying to do that with our software in terms of providing a lot of open source solutions on top of the Microsoft stack to give flexibility the edge.
What are the most exciting developments in education software?
I think the most exciting is that there are lots of options as well as challenges so there are lots of things being produced every day, and to come to an event like this and see so much going on.
What have you learnt so far / interesting things have you heard?
Because there is so much activity going on at Microsoft and so much technology to keep up with, it is often only at events like this I get exposure to other things that are going on in the real world so it is great to be able to interact and have good ideas presented rather than working in a vacuum. It’s one of the things we are trying to do more of now – get feedback early on in our product cycles. I like the variety of interactions in terms of the lightning talks and discussions and the dragon’s den – it’s a good mix of interaction types – and being able to get coding and work through problems at the same time. It’s been very useful.
I have an idea! Part 5
Julian Cheal
UKOLN at the University of Bath
My idea is called JISC Conferenceator. I came up with it yesterday as this week everyone has been aggregating all these different feeds together and having a conference backchannel using Twitter and creating friend graphs so, inspired by that, the JISC Conferenceator is a toolkit which would bring all this together on one site. You would create your conference on this site and bring together all the facilities like built-in support for surveys, an email address and do automatic RSVping and connect to open social networking sites and Flickr so users can connect to that, and all the data would be brought back into the JC site. It will also make it easy to capture delegate feedback – much better than having a long form. All the data will be in one place so after the event you can zip it up into one file to keep.
Video: Lightning talks: Chris Gutteridge, Graham Klyne
Two of yesterday’s lightning talks are now available to watch as videos. We’ve got:
- Words have Power (or what the modern programmer has to learn from ancient Egyptian occultists) by Chris Gutteridge
- Agile Development by Graham Klyne
Click through below to watch the videos.
Five minute interview: Savas Parastatidis
Who are you?
Savas Parastatidis. Until two months ago I worked for Microsoft research in the external research group and now I’m with Microsoft Live Search as an architect.
What are your areas of interest?
Distributed high performance computing. Web services, cloud computing, e-science, scholarly communications, repositories and my primary interest these days is semantic computing. I also travel a lot, and like skiing, music, festivals, and salsa dancing.
What idea are you working on here?
Coming from Microsoft, we usually don’t participate in this kind of competition. So I’m here to give a tutorial on the repository system that Microsoft has built, codename Famulus, which will be released soon as open source.
What’s the major challenge in education software right now?
Ease of use, stability and interoperability. I believe that, especially in institutional repository spaces, as the use of repositories expands and becomes more pervasive, users would like to see better interoperability with client tools and other repository systems. Those who are responsible for deploying repository systems would probably like to see better support for enterprise grade infrastructure which is the reason why Microsoft research has been investigating open source repository systems.
What are the most exciting developments in education software?
I don’t follow that space that closely. But, within semantic computing, doing it on a large scale like Google and Microsoft can and mine the entire web and give you instant answers to key words that you search, the next step is for the same engines, the same companies, to answer your questions in an intelligent way, for information to be pushed to users rather than them having to search for it. We need to build the infrastructure to do that.
What have you learnt so far / interesting things have you heard?
This is my first day, I’ve just arrived! But I’ve been to other events that David has organised and I love them. I love the informal nature of them and that you find people with a specific interest – developers – people who love what they do, you have to love that.
I have an idea! Part 4
Andrew Wasilczuk, Darq (an open source networking consultancy)
Ian Morrison, Darq
Our idea is based on the premise that adverts are bad on websites as they are a waste of bandwidth and screen real estate – they take up room which could be better used. We want to repurpose that space and filter out the adverts and replace them with relevant content. We would implement it by replacing things like Google ad words with relevant data that’s helpful to the university member. So if a student goes to Google and does a search for, say, context switching, Google returns its normal results but, instead of ads on the right hand side of the screen, there would be a box containing local resources. Local in this sense is local to the institution that the user is acessing it from eg links to local library and books relevant to the search, student forums, course notes from the intranet and so on.
Google is very relevant but it is relevant on a global scale – we want to make it relevant on a local scale. An application server, a widget, will generate these local frames, inject them into the page and that widget talks to a sever which knows the answers – a local semantic web. At a simple level we take out the adverts and replace them with something else. What that something is depends on what there is a need for.
It could be done with a Firefox plug-in but then it becomes something else a user has to configure so, to make it easier and remove deployment issues, we would do it at the network level with a transparent proxy (a machine that sits between you and the internet and looks at the traffic and removes the adverts and injects our content). It would happen automatically if the user is connected to the university network.
Video: David Flanders on Happiness Day 4
After the frenzied coding of the last couple of days there’s a change of pace at dev8d today with community collaboration workshops on OPAC, repositories, VLEs and communication tools, plus the chance for developers to enter the Dragon’s Den… David Flanders explains:
I have an idea! Part 3
Marcus Ramsden, University of Southampton
I’m working on a small script plug-in for e-prints. The ultimate goal is for it to be a firefox extension so that whenever an e-print link is displayed on screen, it will display information about that e-print before you click on it. It will be basic meta info – title, authors, date it was added, basic statistical views. In future it could be extended and show things like how many people favourite that e-print etc. It would have been much trickier to do this without the JSON addition created here at dev8D by Chris.
Graham Klyne
I did have a possible idea for the Developer Decathlon which would involve some paper prototyping of an interface for capturing research data from small research groups. However, in the process of following that idea I had a discussion with another participant and he showed me a public service which does a lot of what I had in mind so it seems that we could use that service as a live prototype to discuss with researchers. So I regard that as a very positive outcome.
Stephen Vickers, University of Edinburgh
Michael Aherne, Strathclyde University
It’s a tool for using within VLEs that allows people to create things by plotting points on Google Maps and associating things with the points - it links spatial data with content. The original idea came out of a project on walking tours but the data wasn’t so easy to access and plot then. Now both staff and students can do it so we plan to use it for assignments, too. We’re looking at a history department and the impact of the urban landscape over time, putting things in the context of what happened over history. We can overlay historic maps onto the map and see how it has changed. It will help people to understand why things have changed. It doesn’t have to be a map, it could also be an image like a forensic site or archeological dig or a circuit board.
Five minute interview: Mia Ridge
Who are you?
Mia Ridge, lead web developer at the Science Museum, London
What are your areas of interest?
Online access to collections, lightweight (agile) technologies, user-focused development. Travelling – I love sitting in a coffee shop in a strange country people-watching.
What idea are you working on here?
We’re working on a lazy lecturer idea that helps academics collate online resources during the lecture development process, tag them and then collect and dump them into a powerpoint presentation.
What’s the major challenge in education software right now?
There’s no interaction between museum content and educational software that I know of. There should be more active use of museum objects or collections in teaching at all levels. The challenge is that we only have ad hoc connections with teaching staff at educational institutions and they only have ad hoc connections with educational software developers so there is no real discussion and collaboration.
And in museums?
People don’t know how to do the right thing in putting collections online. The main challenges are institutional and cultural rather than technical. Resources for content curation can be an issue but lack of technical staff is a big issue because low salaries means that we can’t necessarily attract the smartest unless they have a real love for museums. We need to change institutional priorities to acknowledge the size of the online audience and the different levels of engagement that are possible with the online experience. Having talked to people here, museums also need to do a bit of a sell job in letting people know that we’ve changed and we’re not just great big imposing buildings full of stuff.
What are the most exciting developments in education software?
The fact that it exists. I’m doing a part-time Masters and the last time I was studying there were no VLEs and if you missed a lecture that was it – there were no slides or podcasts. For all their faults, the world is better because VLEs exist.
And in the museum sector, online?
For digital collections, going outside the walls of the museum using geo-location to place objects in their original context is amazing. It means you can overlay the streets of the city with past events and lives. Outsourcing curation and negotiating new models of expertise is exciting. Overcoming the fear of the digital surrogate as a competitor for museum visits and understanding that everything we do builds audiences, whether digital or physical.
What have you learnt so far / interesting things have you heard?
I’ve learnt that the HE sector and the museum sector face similar issues. And that we could perhaps collaborate, especially in terms of working with users to enhance our development processes and outcomes. It’s nice to see this event really grounded in the constraints that institutions face – it’s been free, there have been lots of afterhours events so that people can mix and continue discussions – all the good things about an unconference.