Research and networking

Post date: Mar 23, 2011 4:00:29 PM

Joss found the project a great link in the people at Lincoln working on the HEFCE funded Electro Magnates project. We're chatting on the same google group now and have exchanged many useful references. We will also help each other in designing a workshop to be held mid May in Lincoln.

We will all meet April 6th in Leicester to put the finishing touches to our workshop design. We have an interesting structure now, and feel reasonably confident it will work but we'll need to be careful to invite enthusiastic people as we'll need them to work quite hard.

Howard and Richard B will also attend a local meeting of the Sustainable Leicester ICT Group with representatives from University and Council. Howard will give a 20 minute presentation on ICT and user behaviour focused on:

• What areas are most important?
• What identified issues can support or prohibit action in this area?
• What is the best way of demonstrating or measuring impact?
• What kind of projects and research currently address these issues?

(A good set of questions from Neil Wiseman).

Howard and Ken will attend the Visualisation in the Age of Computerisation conference in Oxford this Friday (25th March) and will meet Alan Blackwell the evening before to discuss potential overlaps with our projects/interests. We're particularly keen to link with people in other Universities who will publish electricity meter data openly.

Alex D continues to work very hard on data.ox.ac.uk and we have already used a Google Spreadsheet to pull data and use a Google Chart gadget to represent the data in a graph form. This approach has the advantage of being incredibly simple to do post import data manipulation, thus removing the burden on Alex to support complicated queries. Derek et al previous work made an impressive integration between Facebook and Pachube

which raises the technical question - will a many-University collaboration on open data need such an aggregator. I do not believe the SPARQL distributed query approach will perform well, especially considering how unlikely it will be that all the University data sources will be optimised for querying in the near future. It seems that a single point of query will be the best option. Do we want to approach Pachube or someone similar to host the data. (As an aside this is a very similar problem to the one faced by the open archive initiative community).

Next steps are to focus on creating info-graphics/data representations and how we will use the data from the workshops to inform their design.

Howard Noble