[data.edu.au] OPDs

[Christopher Gutteridge]

Hello to my Austrailian peers!

I thought I'd share some of what we've been up to at data.ac.uk. First 
of all, everything we do is Free & Open Source, so you can resuse, 
improve or just study any bit of what we've done if that's helpful. I 
hope that long term our tools, or their spiritual descendants, become 
more generic and can be deployed more easily and widely.

The big news is http://opd.data.ac.uk/ which collects auto-discovered 
open data profiles from an organisation. It's very simple, easy to 
extend and allows systems to avoid having a single-point-of-failure 
hub/aggregator.

Also we've negotiated with the people who run the .ac.uk domain and now 
have access to the list of all domains, but not formal permission to use 
it, just implicit. We've used this to build a tool which 'observes' the 
homepage of every domain and collects some useful statistics and data. 
We publish this as a big JSON file once a week, but don't do much with 
it yet.
<http://observatory.data.ac.uk/> -- at some point we'll find the time or 
help to build a real front end for it and I think people will be amazed 
at how useful it will be.

Over the summer, we had an intern build an RSS aggregator over all of 
the RSS feeds discovered by the observatory, and this simple but useful 
tool is available at <http://rss.data.ac.uk>

Finally, we're coming to the end of our funding to launch and promote 
<http://equipment.data.ac.uk/> which has been a distinct success, and 
we're hoping that some similar project can keep the team funded after it 
ends.

(other than equipment.data, none of this work is funded and is done by 
me in between my "real" work.)

So, how's it going with  data in edu.au?


-- 
Christopher Gutteridge --http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cjg

University of Southampton Open Data Service:http://data.southampton.ac.uk/
You should read the ECS Web Team blog:http://blogs.ecs.soton.ac.uk/webteam/