Open This

Searching on the Royal Society website was a little trickier than I thought it would be. It was like being given a key to an extensive and ancient archive but not really knowing what the archive held, where the shelves were, what order things were kept, etc. 

As they have a biological component I looked for any articles on GRIDS or Gay Related Immune Deficiency Syndrome / Symptoms which was a forerunner to the HIV/AIDS in that before we knew what the latter was, epidemiology suggested that there was a specific set of symptoms associated with a set of people which pointed to an underlying medical condition. 

The RS seem to have nothing though. Maybe I’m not searching right and perhaps they don’t cover it but either way I couldn’t find anything. So I went to their website to see what kind of material they have and looked up Darwin instead. Plenty of hits there. 

For the Open Source Software part of the session I looked at Freecode and GitHub. GiitHub sounds like a dating website for people who self confessed gits or a nastier version of mysinglefriend.com and lo and behold there is a picture of a smug, self satisfied bloke on the main page. He even describes himself as a ‘git instructor’. Remarkable. 

Anyhoo, I preferred the older Freecode site as it wasn’t full of meaningless pictures. I understand they are trying to humanise technology, especially social media related, but Freecode felt more professional and listed itself well. Plus the gits seem to be trying to flog you something straight away instead of letting me see if I need training, etc.

The names of the software – vifm, burp, dbeaver, kwave, sunflower et al, all peppered with 3, 4 or 5 digit version numbers of course– is meaningless. They could be nuclear release codes for all I know or ways to hack into my bank and add £45,000 to my account risk free, but it all appears to be so much frippery. 

In the interests of fairness I went over to SourceForge as well and that was much nicer. Set up like an ‘older’ system, it presented options in far easier ways. So out with the new, in with the old I cry!

For the open data mashup I looked at borough data and the rateof male hospital admissions attributable to alcohol per hundred thousandpopulation (2005-06). Tower Hamlets came in at a respectable 1,130 (rounded up). Less than Islington (1,218) and Hounslow (1,194)but more than Richmond Upon Thames (785) and Sutton (692). 

If this data was mapped over to cover male homelessness and demographics as well we could perhaps see two things. First of all, we could see if boroughs with high homelessness had higher rates of male hospital admissions attributable to alcohol.

Secondly if we took the demographic data, sorted by age so we could see the 16 – 22 age group and then looked at male hospital admissions attributable to alcohol we may get an idea if it is ‘students’ (used as a catch most term here) in the population that result in high levels of admission due to binge drinking. 

By looking at Alcohol Non Consumption Zones we may then be able to see if areas with these zones had lower rates of alcohol abuse resulting in hospital admission and homelessness than areas without. 

With this data we may then be able to see if ANCZ's would be useful in cutting down male admissions due to alcohol in two key groups, one vulnerable and the other, often, just a bit silly.  

Just put the MBE in the post, I don't have to to come to the Palace to pick it up at the moment.   

Some Antics, Some Antics, they’re up to Semantics!

The semantic web clearly has great usage in areas like epidemiology. Being able to have database type information provided through a more intelligent system can vastly speed up the process of identifying correlations (though not causes) and associated information.

More than that though, the time and money cost of implementing semantic  ideals outweigh the benefits. When I was in the Quality Team at Nokia, one issue that came up was - no surprises – quality. A reason that the company was continually late in delivering software to schedule was that the engineers wanted it to be perfect. All well and good, but this was unacceptable if this dedication caused manufacturing deadlines to slip and product release delays.

So a VP came up with a campaign based around ‘Good Enough is Good Enough’. The simple message was to finish and ship the product. On time. Not when it was ‘ready’, but according to the schedule. Clients, partners and customers wanted a product by the contracted date, not a perfect product at some future point. The former can be altered, the latter cannot. 

And I think this is a major argument and force against the semantic web having the momentum to rally pick up outside of limited areas. Who’s going to want to spend the time creating a far ‘better’ WWW when the one we have now works so well? Only those with a very clear and present need for what it offers.

As a quick aside, perhaps if the adult entertainment / pornography business got behind the idea it would take off. That multi-billion dollar industry has arguably created the internet as a place where you can securely buy products, have high quality video, steam live feeds and driven broadband access just as they led the charge in the move from film to VHS format in the years before. 

Back to DITA and away from the filth merchants, the below is what some of us came up with in relation to RFD triples, taxonomy and ontology...

If X does Y then Z.

In relation to a library the formula could be expressed as...

IF library patron BORROWS library book #765 THEN book status changed to issued.

Clear? Jolly good.

 

I, Library Science Robot.

"...create a design for a mobile application to support your learning on DITA."

The App which struck me as most useful for my needs given my sheer lack of time is one which will act as a ‘runner’ to scout out locations to visit, suggest and where possible retrieve information and continually be scanning information depositories to assist me in assignment creation.

It is based on several key elements and each of the elements has a number of tasks that the App will do. Relational databases will play a large role in what it does as it will be interrogating a large number of information depositories on a regular basis.

Mapping

Generate the location of libraries within my vicinity and display them with blue markers.

Generate the location of libraries within my vicinity which have relevant collections and display them with red markers.

Suggest libraries 25 miles and over which have collections of great relevance.

Within the libraries, the location of relevant material will be mapped based on the App reading the library OPAC  online, matching this to the digital reading list, seeing what is in and out, putting reservations where appropriate and guiding you to the right shelf location for those that are in.

Information

App allows essay titles and questions to be inputted and App will then look for matches to the question and related to keywords across databases and linked OPAC’s.

The APP will read RSS feeds and scan blogs for pre-set keywords creating a list of pages to view. It will also scan for likely matches based on other searches and present them in an ancillary list.

The App will be logged into specific journals and databases, scanning them for new articles which would be of use or related to key words.

It will read previous essays and dissertations which are stored online (such as the British library EThOS service) to suggest likely works, paragraphs or sections to read.

Using the mobile device camera on a page will copy the information to the App, reorder it in a word processing format and tag the bibliographic details to ensure that these are not lost for referencing purposes later.

Assessment

The App will allow essay to be uploaded and will check for plagiarism and copyright infringement.

Overview

In this way the ‘runner’ will allow the user to set up parameters and will then go off and work on these in the background. When a critical mass of information has been retrieved it will be presented to the user and e-mailed to them as well.

This information will consist of places to visit, suggested books, suggested short readings (blogs, essays dissertations, etc), suggested articles and suggested other (databases, new information resources unclassified, newspaper articles, etc).

When visiting the suggested locations the App will guide to user directly to the right shelf or location for the material and the light beam service combined with the camera will allow easy capture of bibliographic data.

Finally, the assignment can be assessed by the App to check for plagiarism, copyright and associated academic standards.

....

I could also imagine this App being banned by every academic institution in the world shortly after it was created.

Ketchup and Mash

So, what has  happened since the last update? 

As you can see the first assignment was handed in. I passed so that's all good. Some useful feedback from the marker as well. I could have sworn I'd put references in and what I'd read but apparently not. Ho hum. Not a terrible mark but no prizes will be won. 

DITA session 5 was on Web 2.0. Even that term sounds slightly old fashioned now. Soon we may move into having named that are iterations rather than numbers as the version number upgrades so much. Web Social, Web Primitive, Web Multimedia, Self Created Web, etc, etc. 

We talked of things such as Facebook and Friends Reunited. I made some excellent points in the discussion in the labs, all of which I have forgotten other than that FR made people look like a happy success whereas FB shows that all is chaos and failure. 

We  had reading week here and the records for that period must remain sealed and not appear on this blog until 25 years after my death. 

Session 6 was on API's and web services. We were back to some of our light programming And I saw just how much of it I remembered. Thank heaven for copy and paste. 

I did knock up something of a mashup page so I too can start polluting the WWW. I won't link to it here as it is too tragic. The fact that the University IT systems seemed to go down around the time the class was doing this is doubtless a coincidence. Behold our XML skills and despair!