The Discovery & DevCSI Developers Competition
A Headache for the judges …
The Discovery Developers Competition was an international contest we held In partnership with DevCSI in the summer of 2011.
The competition was looking for entries with the potential to improve the utility of libraries, archives and museums for their users. Entries were required to make use of one or more of ten listed data sources and the judges applied four broad criteria:
- How easy is it to use?
- How useful is it?
- What potential does it have?
- How engaging is it?
The four judges (from JISC, DevCSI and the Discovery team) were unable to separate the leading entries and therefore we have three very different joint winners.
Andy McGregor of JISC commented, ‘All the judges were enthused by the range, the imagination and the practical potential every one of the short listed entries. These exemplars offer a very tangible encouragement to institutions considering the business case for opening up and licensing their library, archival and museum metadata. Furthermore, whilst the judging criteria focused on the user experience, we also recognized the institutional value of entries falling outside the awards that focused on data processing and associated visualization.’
The Award Winners
Further details of each short listed entry are provided below this announcement.
The three joint winners were
- Discobro – by Mathieu D’Aquin, from the Open University KMI ream
- Timeline – by Alex Parker, a Southampton computer science undergraduate
- What’s About – by Jason Cooper, from Loughborough University Library's systems team
The special award for ‘data munging’ went to Owen Stephens for Composed
Awards were also made for commended uses of each dataset. Eight of the ten listed licensed open data sources were used as well as other resources including Copac and DBpedia. The winners were:
- Archives Hub – Travel & Exploration by Yogesh Patel from Mimas
- British National Bibliography – What’s about by Jason Cooper
- Cambridge University Library – Lodopac by Thomas Meehan from UCL
- English Heritage Places – What’s About by Jason Cooper
- MOSAIC Activity Data - Book Borrowed Chart by Neeta Patel from Mimas
- MusicNet – Discobro by Mathieu D’Aquin
- OpenURL Router – Sheila Fraser & Dimitrios Sferopoulos from EDINA
- The National Archive – Timeline by Alex Parker
Guide to the 11 short listed entries
Book Borrowed Chart Tool
Submitted by: Neeta Patel (Mimas, University of Manchester)
URL: http://npatel.mimas.ac.uk/compitition/JiscMosaicActivitydata/searchisbn.php
Dataset used: JISC MOSAIC Activity Data
Description: This application produces charts and provides supporting data for a specific book or UCAS course code.
Additional information: http://npatel.mimas.ac.uk/compitition/JiscMosaicActivitydata/aboutTool.html. The search form accepts 10-digit ISBN numbers. Demonstrator search terms: ISBN: = 0803990766 or UCAS(Course Code): = G400Command Line Ruby Database-free Processor
Submitted by: Mark van Harmelen (Hedtek Ltd)
URL: http://hedtek.com/2011/playing-with-openurl-router-data/
Dataset used: OpenURL Router
Description: A demonstration of Ruby scripts in the command line to process OpenURL Router data and run queries to establish what proportion of referrals are made by particular referring sources.
Additional information: http://hedtek.com/2011/playing-with-openurl-router-data/Composed
Submitted by: Owen Stephens (Open University)
URL: http://www.meanboyfriend.com/overdue_ideas/2011/07/compose-yourself/
Dataset used: Copac and MusicNet
Description: A Bookmarklet to link information about composers of classical music by exploiting the MusicNet Codex and COPAC catalogue records mentioning a composer.
Additional information: http://www.meanboyfriend.com/overdue_ideas/2011/07/compose-yourself/. Install by dragging the Composed bookmarklet to your browser bookmark bar. In Internet Explorer you need to 1) right-click on the bookmarklet link 2) select ‘Add to favourites...’ 3) select ‘Favourites Bar’ on the ‘Create in’ drop-down list and click ‘Add’DiscoBro: Discovering (Linked Data) Resources while Browsing
Submitted by: Mathieu d’Aquin (KMI, Open University)
URL:http://mean-tech.com/discobro/discobro.html
Dataset used: Archive Hub & MusicNet
Description: An application to discover data resources while browsing the Web. It makes use of the Archive Hub and the MusicNet datasets, but can be extended with any linked dataset providing both a SPARQL endpoint and links to DBPedia. DiscoBro is based on DBpedia Spotlight , a tool for Named Entity Recognition using DBpedia resources as output.
Additional information: http://people.kmi.open.ac.uk/mathieu/about/discobro-discovering-linked-data-resources-while-browsing/. Use this tool by either submitting a url via the text field, or drag the ‘Bookmarklet’ link to the bookmarks bar in your browser.Lodopac
Submitted by: Thomas Meehan [UCL]
URL: http://www.aurochs.org/lodopac/lodopac.php
Dataset used: British National Bibiliography and Cambridge University Library
Description: A simple Linked Open Data OPAC using Sparql to search remote bibliographic RDF data and designed to allow easy setup of additional datasets.
Additional information: http://www.aurochs.org/aurlog/2011/07/31/lodopac-simple-linked-open-data-opac/. The following queries may help: title="fisher" or ISBN="0709039425"OpenURL Router Data Prototype Recommender
Submitted by: Dimitrios Sferopoulos, Sheila Fraser (University of Edinburgh - EDINA)
URL: http://demos.openurl.ac.uk/
Dataset used: OpenURL Router Data
Description: A prototype article recommender demonstrating the use of the OpenURL Router dataset.
Additional information: http://edina.ac.uk/cgi-bin/news.cgi?filename=2011-08-09-openurldata.txt.OpenURL Stat Explorer
Submitted by: Chris Keene (University of Sussex)
URL: http://nostuff.org/openurlde/openurl1/
Dataset used: OpenURL Router Data
Description: A search interface returning general usage statistics from the OpenURL Router dataset.
Additional information: http://chriskeene.posterous.com/openurlacuk-dataTimeline
Submitted by: Alex Parker (University of Southampton, ECS undergraduate))
URL: http://www.3zanders.co.uk/Timeline/
Dataset used: The National Archives on Flickr Commons
Description: Displays the photos from the National Archives via Flickr on a zoomable / scrollable timeline. It attempts to place photos that don't have a specific date tag by parsing the photo description.
Additional information: http://www.3zanders.co.uk/Timeline/ [scroll down page]. Requires Flash:http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/Travel & Exploration Visualisation
Submitted by: Yogesh Patel [Mimas, University of Manchester]
URL: http://ukpmc1.mimas.ac.uk/discovery_map/
Dataset used:Archives Hub Linked Data and The National Archives on Flickr Commons
Description: This tool searches for the travel or exploration journey of particular person or organisation from the Archives Hub Linked Data, plots the places on a map and provides links to browse the data in different formats such as HTML, RDF/XML, JSON, and Turtle. It also links to Images from The National Archives on Flickr Commons.
Additional information: http://ukpmc1.mimas.ac.uk/discovery_map/abouttool/Using Gource to Visualise OpenURL Router Data
Submitted by: Tony Hirst (Open University)
URL: http://blog.ouseful.info/2011/06/08/another-blooming-look-at-gource-and-the-edina-openurl-data/
Dataset used: OpenURL Router Data
Description: A demonstration of how Gource (a repository visualisation tool) can be used to visualise OpenURL Router referrals as nodes of activity. Gource log files were created using command line and Python commands and then the resulting visualisation was captured as a video by compiling a tool called ffmpeg.
Additional information: http://blog.ouseful.info/2011/06/07/visualising-openurl-referrals-using-gource/. http://www.3zanders.co.uk/Timeline/ Requires Flash to play the embedded YouTube videoWhat’s About
Submitted by: Jason Cooper [Loughborough University]
URL: http://whatsabout.lboro.ac.uk/whatsAbout/
Dataset used: English Heritage Places and British National Bibliography datasets
Description: An application to visualise the English Heritage Places dataset, linking it with the British National Bibliography dataset. See the supporting information link for full details on how to use the interface.
Additional information: http://blog.lboro.ac.uk/projects/blog/whats-about/whats-about
Uses cases
The 11 shortlisted entries demonstrate a wide variety of use cases and interfaces for open data, some of which we’ve highlighted below:
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Bookmarklet:
Linked data:
Maps:
Recommender:
Search:
Statistics/dashboard:
Technical:
Visualisation/visual tool: