***Due to issues beyond our control, specifically the fact that Thomson Reuters’ Web Services were not fully released until October 2009 and therefore not available to us within project timescales, Bibliosight deliverables are not yet available.  However, we are in a position to report comprehensively on what those deliverables will be and now expect the prototype to be released some time in January 2010 – this post and relating documentation will be updated at that time.***

Title of Primary Project Output:

The Bibliosight desktop application will allow users to specify an approriate query and retrieve bibliographic data as XML from the Web of Science using the recently released (free) WoS API (WS Lite) and convert into a suitable format for repository ingest via SWORD.

Screenshots or diagram of prototype:

Diagram of how returned XML will be mapped onto LOM XML for ingest to intraLibrary (click on the image for full size):

The full bibliosight process (click on the image for full size):

Description of Prototype:

The prototype is a desktop application written in Java that is linked to Thomson Reuters’ WS Lite, an API that allows the Web of Science to be queried by the following fields:

Queries may also be specified by date* and the service will support the AND, OR, NOT, and SAME Boolean operators.

*The date on which a record was added to WoS rather than the date of publication. In most cases the year will be the same but there will certainly be some cases where an article published in one year will not have been added to WoS until the following year.

An overview of the application is as follows:

Query options: Query – Allows the user to specify the fields to query in the form Code=(query parameter) and the service does support wild-cards e.g. AD=(leeds met* univ*)

Query options: Date - Allows the user to specify either the date range (inclusive) or retrieve recent updates within the last week/two weeks/four weeks

Query options: Database: DatabaseID – Currently WOS only; in order to ensure the client is as flexible as possible this field is included to accommodate additional Database IDs and it may be possible to plug-in additional databases in the future, for example.

Query options: Database: Editions – These checkboxes reflect the Citation Databases filter within WoS:

• AHCI – Arts & Humanities Citation Index (1975-present)
• ISTP – Conference Proceedings Citation Index- Science (1990-present)*
• SCI – Science Citation Index (1970-present)
• SSCI – Social Sciences Citation Index (1970-present)

*ISTP reflects code currently used by API – it is not clear why it doesn’t correspond with term now used in WoS which is CPCI-S – Conference Proceedings Citation Index- Science (1990-present)

Retrieve Options: Start Record – Allows user to specify start record to return from all results

Retrieve Options: Maximum records to retrieve – Allows user to specify maximum records to retrieve between 1 and 100 (N.B.  The API is currently restricted to a maximum of 100 records though it can be queried multiple times.)

Retrieve Options: Sort by (Date) (Ascending/Descending) – Allows user to sort records (currently by date only) ascending or descending in date order.

Proxy settings: This is purely for local network setup at Leeds Met and has nothing to do with WoS but will be necessary for users that are behind a proxy server.

View results: View results of current query (as XML)

Save results: Save results of current query

Perform search request: Perform the specified query

Link to working prototype:

A working prototype will be released as soon as possible – we are aiming for no later than the second week in January 2010 – the prototype will be downloadable from the code repository below.

Please note that you will require an appropriate subscription to ISI Web of Knowledge; the service requires an authorised IP address and you will also need to register for Thomson Reuters Web of Science® web services programming interface (WS Lite) by agreeing to the Terms & Conditions at http://science.thomsonreuters.com/info/terms-ws/ and completing a registration form – if you have any problems you should contact your Thomson Reuters account manager.

This being the case, we also intend to produce a screen cast at the earliest opportunity demonstrating the functionality of the application which will be available from this blog.  Once again, this should be available no later than the second week in January 2010.

Link to end user documentation:

End user documentation:  http://bibliosightnews.wordpress.com/end-user-documentation/

About the project:  http://bibliosightnews.wordpress.com/about/

For use cases see: http://bibliosightnews.wordpress.com/use-cases/

Link to code repository or API:

***Due to issues beyond our control, specifically the fact that Thomson Reuters’ Web Services were not fully released until October 2009 and therefore not available to us within project timescales, Bibliosight deliverables are not yet available.***

The Bibliosight desktop application is the main project output and will be downloadable from http://code.google.com/p/bibliosight/ early in the New Year.

Link to technical documentation:

Technical documentation for WS Lite is available from Thomson Reuters and you should address enquiries to your Thomson Reuters account manager.

Technical documentation relating to the Bibliosight desktop application will be available from http://code.google.com/p/bibliosight/ when the code is released early in the New Year.

Date prototype was launched:

TBC

Project Team Names, Emails and Organisations:

Wendy Luker (Leeds Metropolitan University)      w.luker@leedsmet.ac.uk

Arthur Sargeant (Leeds Metropolitan University)  a.sargeant@leedsmet.ac.uk

Peter Douglas (Intrallact Ltd) p.douglas@intrallect.com

Michael Taylor (Leeds Metropolitan University) m.taylor@leedsmet.ac.uk

Nick Sheppard (Leeds Metropolitan University) n.e.sheppard@leedsmet.ac.uk

Babita Bhogal (Leeds Metropolitan University) b.bhogal@leedsmet.ac.uk

Sue Rooke (Leeds Metropolitan University)  s.rooke@leedsmet.ac.uk

Project Website:

http://bibliosightnews.wordpress.com/

PIMS entry:

https://pims.jisc.ac.uk/projects/view/1389

Table of Content for Project Posts:

1. First Post
2. Quickstep into rapid innovation project management
3. Project meeting number 1:  Draft Agenda
4. Project meeting – minutes
5. eurocris
6. JournalTOCs
7. SWOT analysis – a digital experiment
8. Generating use-cases
9. No one said it would be easy
10. SWOT update
11. Project meeting number 2:  Draft Agenda
12. Use case meeting
13. 20 second pitch at #jiscri
14. Project meeting – minutes
15. Small but important win – we have XML!
16. Research Excellence Framework:  Second consultation on the assessment and funding of research
17. JISC Rapid Innovation event at City of Manchester stadium
18. Quick reminder(s)
19. Just round the next corner…
20. Project meeting number 3:  Draft agenda
21. More on ResearcherID
22. User participation
23. Project meeting – minutes
24. Quick sketch
25. Visit from Thomson Reuters
26. Project meeting number 4:  Draft agenda
27. Project meeting – minutes
28. Thinking out loud…
29. Quick sketch #2
30. Mapping fields from WoS API => LOM
31. Project meeting number 4:  Draft agenda
32. The role of standards in Bibliosight
33. Project meeting – minutes
34. Web Services Lite
35. JournalTOCsAPI workshop
36. Steady as she goes – Bibliosight back on course

On 11th December, 2009, a delegation from the University of Sheffield (weCAMP Project) and Buckinghamshire New University (SMART Project) visited Canterbury Christ Church University to take part in a JISC sponsored assembly with the iBorrow Project team. Also in attendance was Adrian Wheal (the project’s Technical Consultant) and Stephen Steadman (the project’s external Evaluator).

The delegation were treated to a tour of Augustine House (AH) and were able to see, first hand, how the iBorrow netbooks were being used by the students (though as this was the last day of term, the building was not as busy as usual). We had brief presentations and reports from Geoff Kimmons (iBorrow netbooks and Virtualisation) and Chris French (WiFi Access). This went extremely well and was very well received by the delegates. Phil Poole and Wayne Barry gave reports on how the pedagogic research was going and the assembly were treated to images taken from the old Library to compare and contrast with AH.

After lunch, the assembly had a discussion on the Benefits Realisation programme where the University of Sheffield are putting in a £15,000 bid (with Christ Church and Bucks New as partners) to do some modelling using floor plans taken from Augustine House that will allow the iBorrow team to overlay the tracking data over it so that they can develop a more richer picture on how space is being used by students over time.

Another useful post from Lis Parcell. If you are in HE and interested in the use of technology for inclusion, then you’ve probably heard of the HEAT (“HE Assistive Technology”) scheme which funded a massive range of projects in universities across the UK. JISC Techdis, which managed the projects, have upgraded the information available about the projects on their website.

More from: http://blogs.rsc-wales.ac.uk/he/2009/12/14/he-assistive-technology-update/

A reminder that JISC Techdis have a dedicated page for HE information here. And if you would like to order or download JISC Techdis publications for staff development events or meetings there are a number of guides specifically for HE here.

An interesting blog post from Lis Parcell, who attended the event to launch the new free online toolkit from JISC InfoNet – Embedding Business and Community Engagement

It’s designed to help Higher and Further Education institutions work more effectively on all aspects of partnership management. It aims to do this by enabling staff to focus on the internal communications needed to embed ‘BCE’, in order that such activity is supported by core institutional systems rather than being a peripheral activity. The University of Glamorgan ran one of the pilot projects.

http://blogs.rsc-wales.ac.uk/he/2009/12/14/engaging-business-and-the-community-new-resource/

JISC regularly reviews the services that it funds, to ensure they deliver value for money, quality products and to test their sustainability for the future. A services portfolio review takes place annually and in May 2009 the future funding of JISC services, including Intute, was considered in order to identify the funding priorities for the academic year 2010/11. As a result it has now been decided that funding to the Intute service will cease in its current form from 1 August 2010.

JISC and Intute are considering whether limited aspects of the current content could be sustained through different routes perhaps using social networking channels.

For further information on future arrangements please visit: www.intute.ac.uk

One of the key sources we were introduced to as students in first-year information science is the Intute web directory, funded by JISC. With it’s unparrallel credibility (websites are selected by librarians and information professionals) and ever growing suite of side products :

• the Virtual Training Suite (offering more than 60 web-based tutorials teaching Internet research skilss)
• the Internet Detective (tutorial launched in 2006 by the partnership between IRLT and Manchester Metropolitan University)

… Intute was a, in my sense, a rising star in quality online information with the added bonus of promoting information literacy online to students.

One of my favourite daily sources is the Resource shelf blog and this post today transmitted the info that JISC would abandon further funding for Intute and that, starting August 2010, the site would remain online but with minimal maintenance. The reasons JISC gave were that their policy was to develop websites and resources that could develop sustainable funding on their own. So is there any institution willing and capable of pursuing the Intute project?

I thought it was probably about time that I explained a bit about what I do in my job…

I’m the research assistant on project LinkSphere, which is a joint research project with the University of Reading and UCL, funded by the JISC Virtual Research Environment 3 programme. The project is aiming to develop a virtual research environment (VRE) which will allow cross-repository searching across various digital collections and archives (including (just to name a few) the Silchester IADB, Film Collection, Film, Television and Theatre archive, the Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology collections, The Museum of English Rural Life collections and the Cole Museum of Zoology collections) producing a useful user interface to various disparate digital collections.

My role is to focus on the way that social networking technologies are used by academics and how they might be integrated into a VRE and how they work with the museum and archive collections. I am also in essence the audience advocate, making sure that the user needs are met. The UCL team are on board to ensure that the project is a fully user driven design process, and that all user requirements are fed directly into the development of the project.

Development of the VRE will be undertaken at the University of Reading, with user analysis and usability from us at UCL.

All in all it’s a pretty cool job, I’m getting into the swing of things now (I’ve been here a couple of months). I’ve been doing some fun things with Twitter backchannels as well as asking questions to repository managers about the use of digital resources within repositories and how they want this project to work for them.

so thats my day job, by night I’m a tea drinking, chocolate eating, museum geeking, amusement making superhero type thing (not much of a power compared to xray vision, or telekinesis but i like it).

NB: The views expressed on my blog are completely my own rather than those of my employer.

Another catch-up post.  JISC TechWatch did a great job with the other report authors in pulling together this:

Low carbon computing: a view to 2050 and beyond : JISC.

Put it in your Christmas reading.

Diagram of prototype: schematically we can show how the prototype supports the aggregation and of RSS feeds comprising table of contents information from selected journals and filters them (using pre-existing software called sux0r) into two feeds, one of which is has information about those papers that are predicted to be relevant to a user’s research interests. The project has added the ability to interact with sux0r through third-party software.

Our work has shown how effectively this works for a trial group of researchers; in most cases, after sufficient training of the system, the outgoing feeds were successfully filtered so that one contained a significantly higher concentration of interesting items than the raw feeds and the other did not contain a significant number of interesting items.

End User of Prototype:
We have an installation of sux0r which people are welcome to register on and which can be used to set up feeds for aggregation (you will not automatically be given sufficient privileged to approve feeds, so it is best to contact the project about this). The base URL for the API for this installation is http://icbl.macs.hw.ac.uk/sux0rAPI/icbl/ and the API calls which have been implements are documented in the following posts on this blog: Return RSS items for a user and ReturnVectors and ReturnCategories. Also available: a summary of other features for the API have been scoped. The latest update was 08 December 2009.

Here’s a screen cast of Lisa using the API

(NB the version at the end of the link is a whole lot clearer than the embedded YouTube version, especially if you click on the view in HD option).

The code for our work on the API is in a branch of the main sux0r repository on sourceForge.

Project Team
Phil Barker, philb@icbl.hw.ac.uk, Heriot-Watt University (project manager)
Santiago Chumbe, S.Chumbe@hw.ac.uk, Heriot-Watt University (developer)
Lisa J Rogers, l.j.rogers@hw.ac.uk, Heriot-Watt University (researcher)

Project Website: http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/bayesff/
PIMS entry: https://pims.jisc.ac.uk/projects/view/1360

Table of Content for Project Posts
Development work

• About suxor
• New Features Planned for suxor
• OAuth
• Feature Implemented: Return RSS Items for a user
• Features: ReturnVectors and ReturnCategories
• noAuth

User trialling

• Trialling of Bayesian Feed Filter
• User Trialling
• Preliminary Findings of User Trials
• User Activity
• Statistics of User Trial Results
• User Trials Follow Up Satisfaction Survey

Community Engagement

• BayesFF in 45 Seconds
• Idea: Extension to previous literature
• About Sux0r
• New Featues Planned For Sux0r

Project Mangement

• Project Kicks Off
• SWOT Analysis
• Final Post (this one)

Another belated report on a staff development activity…

Back in November, along with Jim Adams from FHHS and Alan Rolfe from FOTA, I attended a JISC / Netskills workshop in London: How can e-Portfolios support 21^st century learning?

TVU has never had an officially supported e-Portfolio or PDP system, although Faculty staff  have adopted a variety of approaches for use by their students. Nursing is one area where Portfolios are an essential component of many courses. Jim has been involved in the past in the development of appropriate forms e.g. for recording students’ reflections on work placement, made available as Word templates downloadable from Blackboard. Jim was also involved in a small-scale pilot using PebblePad during 2008-9, with generally positive outcomes; although the Faculty’s licences have now lapsed. Alan teaches on Media and Journalism courses where, again, work placement is an important part of the curriculum. He has been looking into the e-Portfolio options available, including PebblePad and Mahara; both Alan and Jim have also looked at the potential of using Blackboard Portfolios.

The JISC event provided a useful overview of what e-Portfolios are, what they can used for, and what tools are available, with case studies from a variety of FE and HE institutions.
See this slideshare from Lisa Gray of JISC for an overview of the day and the topic – Introduction to e-Portfolios

The two key messages which I took away were

1. decide what you want to use Portfolios for before considering which software to use
2. Portfolios should belong to the individual – they are a personal space, in contrast to the VLE which is an institutional space.

The first case study was presented by Neil Currant of Bradford University, where all staff and students have a PebblePad account.
See http://www.brad.ac.uk/lss/tqeg/pebblepad/index.php for more information on the ways in which PebblePad is used at Bradford.

Merv Stapleton from City of Sunderland College presented findings from The Comport Project which looked at uses of e-Portfolios in Work Based Learning: courses in 3 Colleges used a variety of approaches, including Blackboard Portfolios, Learning Objects private journals set up in Blackboard, and the use of PDAs.

Geoff Rebbeck showed examples of how PebblePad is used at Thanet College (FE), by learners and as a staff CPD tool.

He also showed a spectrum of possible uses for Portfolios, placing e-Portfolio products in the appropriate place on this spectrum (see slide 6 of the slideshare).

Geoff made the point very strongly that Portfolios are (or should be) personal, not institutional. Some of his other comments: “the Subject is the Author”, “a Portfolio is intimate software”, an e-Portfolio is “a VLE for one”.

At Thanet, PebblePad was rolled out to staff before it was made available to students. This was to make staff familiar with the specific software and, more importantly, with the underlying concept of e-Portfolios, before being asked to promote them as part of teaching and learning in the College. This seems an entirely sound approach. I certainly feel a little uneasy when I find myself providing Blackboard support to staff who say that they are being pressurised into using the VLE, and have no underlying engagement with or understanding of the uses of blended learning. Telling your students to use a tool, when you don’t know how it works, and possibly don’t see the point of it, is unlikely to produce a successful learning experience.

At Thanet the use of PebblePad is reinforced with staff in a number of ways – for example the OLT evaluation process is carried out through the e-Portfolio; Staff Development evaluation forms are only available from the e-Portfolio, and when completed these must be shared with the Staff Development office.

see more on e-Portfolios at Thanet College on the LSIS Excellence Gateway

Another example of the use of e-Portfolios with staff was the Flourish eCPD programme at the University of Cumbria. They have a couple of rather nice animations promoting the benefits of using e-Portfolios with staff.

In the afternoon we had a brief chance to use three e-Portfolio products: PebblePad, Mahara and ePet (an open source product developed at Newcastle University).

Jim, who has experience of using PebblePad, didn’t like the look and feel of Mahara. Alan and I, on the other hand, both felt at home with the Mahara interface, and didn’t like PebblePad, at least in part because the interface looks like it’s been designed to appeal to schoolchildren. These were first impressions however, and possibly unfair – PebblePad was developed at a University (Wolverhampton), is widely used in Universities (including Imperial, Kings, Hertfordshire, Brunel, City, Middlesex and Oxford Brookes), and is probably further on in its development than Mahara.

These two products appear to be the most likely candidates to be adopted at TVU, and to judge effectively between them we need time to run comparisons, with a number of staff – and students – given the chance to try them out.

Just a note to say that this WON’T be the final post on the blog, however, it is the ‘Final Progress Post’ in terms of the requirements of the ArtNotes (RTNOTES) JISCRI project… so let’s begin…

Title of Primary Project Output

ArtNotes : An iPhone application for thematically organising images and other visual artefacts.

Project Tag

RTNOTES

Screenshots

Description of Prototype

The prototype demonstrates the ability to organise images in thematically related categories displayed in the application as ‘Notebooks’, allowing the ability for cross-boundary images to be displayed in multiple ‘Notebooks’.

In order to enhance the application there is the ability to import and export images from the devices built in photo library and camera, as well as Flickr, perhaps the most popular online repository for images.

Alongside the image itself, the application caters for storage of various elements of meta-data including the ‘geo-tag’ of an image which may then be displayed on a map as a series of ‘pins’.

The prototype has focused on the core idea behind the project, that of organisation and storage. Features which are desired, yet lack a fully tested implementation include:

• Complete Flickr synchronisation
• Integration with other repositories such as Google Images

During the course of the development a variety of potential areas for expansion were identified, however as these are potential areas for future work and not directly related to the project they are not included for brevity.

Link to Working Prototype

As the iPhone is a closed platform, a working prototype is unavailable, except from the App Store.  ArtNotes is undergoing a final round of testing and failing any major problems will be submitted to the App Store over the Christmas period.

However, the ‘End User Documentation’ below and the screenshots above should give an overview of the functioning application.

Link to End User Documentation

The ‘End User Documentation’ is slightly lacking, as it was delivered to testers and potential end users in a presentation format, alongside a ‘live demo’ of the application.

The following link provides a downloadable copy of the latest presentation in PPSX format:

http://artnotes.googlecode.com/files/EndUserDocumentation.ppsx

Link to Code Repository or API

The code repository can be found here: http://artnotes.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ArtNotes/

This contains a buildable MonoTouch solution for the ArtNotes project.

Link to Technical Documentation

Unfortunately, there seems to be a slight issues with MonoDevelop, in that it currently doesn’t generate the XML docs for a MonoTouch project (the actual issue is that smcs doesn’t support the ‘/doc’ option). As such this means the technical documentation is limited to the comments and functional descriptions found inside the source code files.

However, if the XML docs can be generated this will be updated and a link will be provided.

The source code, as above, can be found here: http://artnotes.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ArtNotes/

Date Prototype was Launched

The latest build of the application was given to testers / end users 2009.12.09

Project Team Names, Emails and Organisations

Owen Watson <o.watson _at_ bolton.ac.uk> University of Bolton

Kirk Barron <k.barron _at_ bolton.ac.uk> University of Bolton

Dave Hagan <d.hagan _at_ bolton.ac.uk> University of Bolton

Roy Attwood <r.attwood _at_ bolton.ac.uk> University of Bolton

Project Website

http://code.google.com/p/artnotes

http://www.osrg.org/artnotes

PIMS entry

https://pims.jisc.ac.uk/projects/view/1361

Table of Content for Project Posts

This section gives a list of the relevant posts on the blog from the project. It is broken into 4 categories:

1. Initiation – The beginning of the project and the initial set up
2. Issues and Reflections – More could perhaps have been done in terms of reflection, however in terms of problems (aside from time ) the only real issues were that of hardware and software availability
3. Progress – Some posts showing the progress which was made with the project
4. Community – Posts which are related to the ‘Open Source’ community. As the project was licensed under the GPL v2 and is available on Google Code, it was decided that if anything specific, which may be useful to others, was written it could be presented as such. The posts listed are linked to from the MonoTouch wiki (http://wiki.monotouch.net) or from MonoTouch.Info (http://www.monotouch.info).

Initiation

• http://artnotesdev.wordpress.com/2009/07/15/start-up-handover/
• http://artnotesdev.wordpress.com/2009/07/20/planning/
• http://artnotesdev.wordpress.com/2009/07/30/google-code/
• http://artnotesdev.wordpress.com/2009/08/09/website/

Issues and Reflections

• http://artnotesdev.wordpress.com/2009/08/14/the-on-going-problem-of-purchasing/
• http://artnotesdev.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/an-iphone-an-iphone-my-office-for-an-iphone/

Progress

• http://artnotesdev.wordpress.com/2009/09/14/monotouch-2/
• http://artnotesdev.wordpress.com/2009/09/29/progress/
• http://artnotesdev.wordpress.com/2009/10/01/flickr-integration/
• http://artnotesdev.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/a-simple-progress-post/
• http://artnotesdev.wordpress.com/2009/10/16/lots-of-little-pieces/
• http://artnotesdev.wordpress.com/2009/10/27/finally/
• http://artnotesdev.wordpress.com/2009/11/20/source-code-availability/
• http://artnotesdev.wordpress.com/2009/12/03/screen-shots/

Community

• http://artnotesdev.wordpress.com/2009/10/27/some-code/
• http://artnotesdev.wordpress.com/2009/11/20/source-code-availability/
• http://artnotesdev.wordpress.com/2009/12/03/download/

Edit: No idea why the links aren’t all aligned… There’s nothing wrong in either the Visual or HTML views…

Attending the JISC Flexible Service Delivery (FSD) Programme Strategic Technologies Group workshop, Congress Centre, London.

First impressions: great turnout, over 20 different suppliers/over 20 different institutions represented,former including big (Oracle, IBM) & small(er) (oMbiel, WPM), latter mostly HE but including some FE; plus various people from JISC, UCISA, CETIS etc. Evidence that one of the main objectives of the Programme – raising awareness of/engagement with flexible service thinking, EA etc – is already having some success; I don’t think we’d have got this kind of participation if we’d tried this event 12 months ago (but of course, the  huge amount of preparatory effort that’s taken place wouldn’t have happened back then, which is what has really made this work).

Plus of course the issues raised by Chris Cobb/Roehampton in his introductory remarks – & informed by the Chancellor’s pre-budget speech yesterday – are pushing institutions in this direction, if they think about it: doing more with less, making the best of what you’ve got, developing speed, agility, flexibility – these are what FSD & EA are all about.

First two case study type presentations on a couple of FSD/STG consortia pilots, one on sharing finance functions in HE, the other student tracking & engagement with De Montfort & Southampton Solent. Both very much works in progress that look like they will bring some benefits. Interesting comments from Paul Hopkins/De Montfort on issues around DPA placing severe restrictions on personal data being held in hosted services offshore/in the US.

Next from Peter Tinson, UCISA Executive Secretary, on Supplier Engagement – a group activity to discuss the requirements of the Suppliers Forum. Key objectives:

• Greater agility. Best of breed at the module level, with standard interfaces.
• More efficient processes – an institutional issue.
• Improved business intelligence. Need for improved data quality.
• Shared services. Previous 3 bullet points are the precursor.

& I would of course add that EA is the essential means of articulating all of the above.

So – how to promote the customer/supplier dialogue that is essential to support moving forward? The Online Supplier Forum – possible structure/content demonstrated. Point from Simon Tindall/Desire2Learn – the FSD needs to persuade/convince suppliers that there is HEFCE/Government/Institutional backing for the approach to sell work that needs doing internally. Question – given that this is all about service-enablement, standards, SOA, and disaggregation/modularisation, why wouldn’t suppliers be doing it anyway, & if a supplier needs to sell the business case to do the ‘extra’  kind of work required to participate, then maybe they shouldn’t – or we don’t want them to – bother!

Then into a discussion session with suppliers & other institutions about barriers/enablers. Interesting comments from Barrie Hoban/Blackboard – surprised that we’re not starting from process definition – good point, we are looking at this too much from the technical end & there is a desire (need!) to go beyond shared technology to real shared services. This may lead to more of a rant on this blog later – & again emphasises the need to maintain the EA aspects. Certainly doesn’t look to me as if enough effort is going into EA/process definition & preparing senior management in institutions for the prospect of shared business processes, rather than just the technical systems that sit behind them – albeit this is where the real value lies.

Also, having just been in two days of LJMU internal strategic development type stuff, as soon as shared services are discussed – & they were, & were plainly on the table, which is good – all the arguments about not sharing/outsourcing strategic advantage start coming out of the woodwork, suggesting that there is still some work to be done on defining what gives strategic advantage & what doesn’t. All about operating models & value chains, stuff that institutions maybe haven’t given a lot of thought to – does sharing/outsourcing part of the value chain give away the value? Do we know what the value chain is? & back we come to EA – if we’re going to think about what services we can share, we need to know what services we’ve got (& how they work) in the first place.

Question: what is different about the supplier relationships the FSD wants to promote, as opposed to the relationships that institutions already have with suppliers? Answer – latter is traditionally/mostly one-to-one, former wants to be many-to-many. Where suppliers do collaborate, institutions are not generally party to the conversation – perhaps FSD could facilitate this. Final point – what we need from suppliers is practical evidence of engagement with the agenda, not just saying the right things – perhaps suppliers could be invited to demonstrate what they could bring to pilot activity? – & coincidentally, latter was exactly what Peter Tinson/Alex Hawker suggested at the end of the session.

Last morning session – David Rose on the EA in HE Practice Group. EA = a way of managing change, bridging the gap between business/strategy development & ICTs, as an integrated whole. Sounds good to me!

First thing after lunch – general roundup from John Slater/ALT reflecting on barriers/enablers from STG questionnaire/the morning session. Discussion: what do we want suppliers to do differently to engage? We want practical demonstrations of input to FSD pilots. Question that suppliers might ask: if you want this disaggregation/modularisation of our products, to what level do you want it done? If (using John Slater’s analogy) you don’t want us to glue all the lego together for you in advance, do you want any bits glued together? How big do you want the bits to be? Do you want freeform bits, or do you want them in kitform? (Probably not the latter, no point buying the pieces if you can only make a pirate ship out of them). (Unless you want a pirate ship). If you want a pirate ship, & we can sell you a pirate ship, why do you want to build your own? – the answer to the latter is obviously that you might give up piracy & go into the oil tanker business…this analogy has now gone far enough.

Last session: Luke Taylor/Bristol – Building The Business Case For FSD. Discussion groups – looking at change management. Very early on identified need for Governance, & EA as an essential precursor to FSD. If only I can get Programme Management in there we’ll score the holy trinity again! Seriously, lack of effective Goverance structures did seem to be a serious impediment to EA/FSD-type work – which of course it would be, as if you don’t have a transparent decision-making structure, how can you define & deploy EA? Usual familiar things as well – speak English, sell benefits not methodologies/technology, think/speak/act as if the business/IT ‘disconnect’ doesn’t exist (it shouldn’t & is in any event unfortunate if not spurious). Change the language – change the world.

The user trials consisted of 5 main stages.

• An initial meeting to demonstrate the system.
• An initial questionnaire to gather expectations
• Training: Users spent between 4-6 weeks training the system
• A follow up meeting to indicate how successfully their interests had been matched; and;
• A follow up questionnaire to gauge the users’ satisfaction.

The results of the follow up survey are discussed in more detail below.
Question 1.

Were enough “Not Interesting” articles filtered out of the “Interesting” feed to make reading this feed manageable?

Though the percentages of interesting items delivered to each user were in general lower than the users had indicated would be acceptable in the initial questionnaire. The users seemed to be happy with this result and in most cases the percentage of “not interesting” in the “interesting” feed was greatly reduced.

13 users answered yes, 4 answered no and 1 was not sure.

Question 2.

If the “Not Interesting” feed wrongly contained “interesting” articles, was the percentage small enough to tolerate?

The majority of the users were able to tolerate some “interesting” articles being filtered out into the “not interesting” feed.

15 users answered yes; 3 answered no.

Question 3.

Would you consider using a similar tool in the future?

The majority of users indicated that they would consider using a similar tool in the future. This gives us a certain confidence that the concept of applying Bayesian filtering to journal articles is worth investigating further.

15 users answered yes; 2 answered maybe; 1 answered no.

Question 3 cont…

If yes, which of the following would you consider?
[a] A stand alone tool?
[b] A tool integrated into an existing tool you use everyday i.e. in an email client/feed reader/iGoogle?
[c] Integrated into a library or research tool such as web of science?

Users were able to enter more than one choice.

There were 6 votes for [a]; 13 votes for [b]; 12 votes for [c]

Users were then asked which of the above would be their preferred option?

3 voted for [a]; 6 voted for [b]; 7 voted for [c]; 1 user thought daily/weekly email alerts would be a better option.

The strong preference for integration into other tools (options b and c) rather than use as a stand alone tool is interesting as it validates our supposition that an API would be useful, i.e. that it would be desirable to be able to integrate interact with sux0r into other tools.

Question 4.
If you would consider using a similar tool in the future, what do you think the advantages of doing so would be?

The main advantages offered by the users included time saving by filtering out unwanted articles, the ability to scan more journals and a single place to scan the latest articles form interesting journals. Only one user considered a similar tool not to have any advantages.

A selection of responses follow below:

If trained sufficiently the tool would save time in showing the searches from interesting results, with keywords on saved interests.

To flag up interesting articles without the user having to actively search for them i.e. it would help with horizon scanning.

Make e-journals more helpful when filtering interesting articles and not interesting ones.

1. One advantage would be a single place to find interesting reserach articles. 2. If the feed is trained well, then less time is spent on uninteresting articles. 3. If it is integrated into broader serach tools like iGoogle it would have wider reach.

As it highlights interesting/prospectively interesting journals that you may not be able to find easily using databases search such as science direct.

Quicker sorting of interesting and not interesting articles

Keeping up to date with new articles. But disadvantage is the guilt of seeing all the interesting things you should read but don’t have time to.

Saving time. However I am not sure I would be completely confident in the results I would get.

Screening for new articles would become more organised rather than my random search at the moment which only happens when I need to find information.

Tend to search on the basis of keywords; this appears to work better.

It does appear to throw up interesting articels that I might otherwise miss.

Time saving and effective worktime

Obviously it will save a lot of time

Simultaneous filtering of many journals

Make looking for papers more fun because much of the clutter is removed compared to reading journal indexes. And I find more interesting articles compared to googling or searching by keyword.

a) save time, reduce number of articles. b) We can create research group feed of interest

Even with uninteresting articles in the mix it still allowed me to find dozens of articles that would have passed me by otherwise. I felt it was worth the effort & still a lot less effort than reading all the tables of contents would have been. A key advantage for me was that it effectively allowed me to, in a similar length of time, scan the contents of a far greater number of journals than I would have studied by hand. A worthwhile tool if you can be bothered to train it.

Get an overview of recently published articles with at least some relevance to me, which at the moment I’m not getting.

o Title of Primary Project Output: SPACER: In-field discovery of geoscientific data from mobile phones

o Screenshots or diagram of prototype:

o Description of Prototype: SPACER software enables GPS-supported mobile phones, running Google’s Android platform, to query metadata repositories supporting the catalogue service standard of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC).

o End User of Prototype: students and researchers in any discipline that requires fieldwork e.g geology, geophysics, archaeology and geomatics.

o Link to working prototype: click here

o Link to end user documentation: click here

o Link to code repository or API: click here

o Link to technical documentation: click here

o Date prototype was launched: Tuesday 8th December 2009

o Project Team Names, Emails and Organisations:

 Project Manager: Mike Jackson, mike.jackson@nottingham.ac.uk, Centre for Geospatial Science – University of Nottingham

 Software Engineer: Gobe Hobona, Gobe.Hobona@nottingham.ac.uk, Centre for Geospatial Science – University of Nottingham

 Stakeholder Representative(BGS): Colm Jordan, cjj@bgs.ac.uk, British Geological Survey

 Stakeholder Representative(Edina): Ben Butchart, b.butchart@ed.ac.uk, Edina – University of Edinburgh

o Project Website: click here

o PIMS entry: click here

o Table of Content for Project Posts:
 Introducing SPACER
 Day-to-Day work
 Small Wins & Fails
 Project SWOTing
 User Participation-Use Case
 User Participation-User and Functional Requirements
 Day-to-Day work 2
 Small Wins and Fails 2
 Prototype Status Video
 Ranking Results
 LBS2009 Showcase
 MapView on the move
 Source Code released
 SPACER at Londroid Android meeting
 SPACER goes into testing
 Technical Standards
 Value Add
 User Testing

A video demonstrating version 1.0 of the prototype is now available.

Powerpoint version of talk given by Simon Grant to more

On December 7th 2009, researchers from BGS, Edina and CGS undertook a SPACER usability evaluation. The activity involved walking along footpaths on Jubilee Campus. The evaluation went well, both the client and server-side applications performed well. The feedback was very useful and will be applied to future development of the application.

The change from JavaME on Symbian to Java on Android was the most significant change. The change was made due to signing restrictions on JavaME Midlets.
Another significant change was the choice of Deegree CSW over Geonetwork CSW. The reason for the change was that, at the time, Geonetwork spatial filters did not include ‘contains’ operations.

If you want to download and build the current version of ArtNotes, you can get it here ArtNotes-2009.12.03.zip

Due to the requirements of the project sponsors, it’s licensed under the GPL, however as I wrote the code, I can license it as I want, so if you want to use any of it (maybe under a different license?) feel free to contact me

Edit: If you download the code you might notice that the quality can be somewhat lacking. This is the joy of deadlines. I am, however, planning on revisiting and refactoring the worst bits .

Thought some screenshots might be in order… as per my previous post, most of the screens are still a little beta…

Again, it’s been a while since the last post. Something which I must apologise for yet again. It’s been really busy round here, lots of meetings and other University stuff which has managed to sap all my time.

I’ve also been working hard getting ArtNotes into a more workable product. It’s gotten pretty good, and the people who’ve used it seem to think the stuff it does is good although they pretty much all agree that the interface needs more work.