Irony...

As stated elsewhere, I don't think there's anything to any astrology beyond being an an inspiration to cause people to be a little introspective, and to project their own thoughts onto what are usually either 50/50 statements to go one way or the other, or reasonably safe moral certainties. Amongst the tons of spam I filter every day, this little gem popped it's head up

It may be tough to get past a breech of trust today, especially if someone close has disappointed you. Nevertheless, you may have to forgive him or her, no matter how hard this is to do. Don't let your sensitivity get in the way; swallow your fear, move past your old hurts, and accept that you aren't responsible for fixing all the wounded people in your life.

So, I would suggest this falls into the moral certainty category, but it's a good thought, and trust is a theme close to my centre, so, even though the method is nonsense, the effect is real.

Peace out kids!

27th of november and all's well, nothing of interest here.

Which is to say... I'm compiling jzkit3, which incidentally is going to be the most stonking thing to hit the open source library world in years, and generally avoiding work..... In the course of this afternoons full build and regression test, I've listened to two lectures on quantum spin by Richard Feynmann, blundered around facebook, mucked about with my fedora internet desktop and generally made a pain of myself in the office, and discovered death cab for cutie. Ooh I also wrote some technical questions to ask in the latest round of recruitment, had a browse of some blogs I read, and am saddened to discover that some of my faves have gone away. Such is the nature of the old interweb I guess. So thats it, I'm either out of interesting things to do for the day, or the things left to do need more brain power than I have left....... whats left to do but write to the future me by piling yet more crap on the internet :)

ooh it's training tonight, which I'm just enjoying so much at the moment that it hurts (No, really, it actually does, but only in a good way). Usually by this time of year I'm into raw willpower mode to keep myself going until the long winter evenings lift, but for some reason things seems well with the world, and most things seem to be unfolding as they should. In academic land my new hobby is trying to get to grips with bioinformatics.. the latter part isn't so bad, the former is a nightmare for me... praise be for Genetics for Dummies, and for the OU :).

Anyways, thankyou whoever you are (*slaps self for marillion reference*)

Peace out,
e.

Open Office for Uni Courses - SHU Biomedical Science

Hmm... not sure if this post really belongs here or on my work blog.. I think here.

I had a teeny run in with a Uni recently when it was suggested that Microsoft Word and Excel must be used for production of various assignments. I'm wasn't suggesting that the eventual hand-in couldn't be a .xls or a .doc but purely that mandating the tool wasn't a legitimate thing to do, and indeed that I felt it was ethically very shaky position for a uni to adopt, particularly given recent EU rulings. Anyway, long story short, the official party line is that students can use whatever tools they like, provided that they hand in something that can be opened in word or excel. Peachy!

We all know the truth tho, sometimes, OOo does have subtly different menu structures and features to different versions of the MS tools (Just as different versions of the MS tools themselves do) and sometimes, documents don't open in different versions of office as they do in OOo. I offered to update the Excel for Biomedical Sciences workbook with annotations for OOo, an offer which met with stony silence, go figure. But the problem remains, how do we organise it so that Biomedical, and other science students generally, can use OOo toolset and be confident that the output will be acceptable in it's .doc and .xsl forms, and that it's easy to find out how to perform a function that is located in a different area to the MS Office toolset.

So, in the interests of being community spirited, I'm going to try and use the following delicious tags SHUBioMedSci and OOo whenever I find a resource about using OOo for Bio Medical Science at Sheffield Hallam, yielding the following Search for SHUBioMedSci AND OOo which will hopefully return useful resources to anyone interested.

Peace and Love,
e.

Doncaster Balloon Festival - TKD Demo

Testing vid upload to youtube, an old vid of Mr Graham Churchill and I from a while ago.

Nuts, Gradings and Conferences

Time for one of those gruesome personal postings I feel...

It's been a busy old week all told. On monday I was lucky enough to meet some of the lovely NHS staff at the Hallamshire Hospital walk in centre, and then a lovely couple of paramedics, and then the amazing staff in the Northern General A&E ward. You're all F*****g amazing, lovely people with amazing professionalism and committment, and doing an incredibly hard job in very difficult circumstances. The cause of all this trouble? Well I was unlucky enough to somehow get some nuts in my lunch. Alas, my baaad habit of having far too many chillis in dinner somewhat disguised the taste so the first I knew about it was the unfortunate swelling lip feeling you get. It was a truly unusual experience, as I only really felt slightly unwell, and wandered up to the walk-in centre just to see if they might be able to give me something a bit stronger for the reaction. Initially, they said it was fine and just to watch it. However, some hour or so later, as I was walking back into town a full on reaction set in, so I popped back up to the walk-in centre where they sorted me right out. For some unknown reason, my oxygen saturation levels weren't returning to normal, and I had a quck whiz up to the hallamshire with a couple of lovely paramedics, who did a great job of keeping me more or less awake enough to enjoy screaming through the rush hour traffic :) So that was enough excitement for one day :)

And Tuseday was my second GJR grading, which was HAAARD! but ultimately very enjoyable and rewarding. Watching Glen and his grading was amazing, especially the kata, but everyone really shone, and put in the effort called for on an occaision like that. Beers all round in the pub afterwards, and that great feeling of being a part of something you only get when pushed so hard you have to produce your best stuff. I can only hope my performance wasn't enhanced by the frightnening volume of steroids I'd had the day before ;)

Today.. well thats my first day at ALT-C. Should have been here yesterday, but wasn't feeling 100% after mondays activities. The conference is pretty enjoyable. I'm mainly here for the folksonomies vs controled vocabs and repositories presentations. Quite a nice atmos at the conference. Some interesting LOM/XML things going on, and some ePortfolio presentations that I really should track, although the more I get into that the more it seems like jena/RDF is a much better tool for it. Not bumped into any of the SAKAI people from the Austin conference, which is a pity, was hoping to catch up with some of them.. time yet I guess.

New Blog!

Finally decided that this blog was getting too schitzo torn between pseudo work and pseudo personal stuff, so from now on, all the work stuff has moved out to My Work Blog. That means you'll probably find less tech stuff here from now on :)

Sheffield and South Yorkshire eRider Meetup?

Ok.. I have a teeny problem with Meetup.com... They want you to pay for the group in advance before anyone has signed up to it, and there must be loads of other tools for managing a community of people :).

So here's a starter for ten: Assuming your an eRider, an e-Rider, an IT professional, an enthusiastic geek, involved with Circuit Riding in any way shape or form, interested in volunteering IT based time and skill to the VCS or third sector, and in Sheffield or South Yorkshire then I'm hoping that you've put those words into google, and, unlike me, come up with a link to this blog entry instead of the usual detritus google serves up.

I'd be really interested in getting together with any other people involved in volunteering IT skills in and around Sheffield and south Yorkshire. Right now, there isn't a meetup group, and the eRiders.net frappr map for the area only lists three people involved in and around sheffield.. there must be more of us? Anyway, I thought it might be fun to get together and chat / discuss stories and strategies. If there's any interest, maybe we could get a crossover meeting with the sheflug linux user group, or just have a beer. On a more practical note... there are a number of projects launching around Sheffield at the moment that I reckon the local eRider community could have a real positive impact on, and I'd be interested in talking those through with anyone who's interested.

Add a comment to this post, or drop me a mail ianibbo - at - yahoo - dot - com.

Ok.. in an uncharacteristic act of faith ;) I paid the $72 and set up a meetup account... See http://volunteerism.meetup.com/150/ please come and I'll buy you -a- beer :D

Amazing!

Had to blog this.. it speaks for itself. Just watch, needs no introduction: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129

SWG - Semantic Web Gateway Project

Today a group of us (open source developers in sheffield) got together to discuss some components they all have, some problems that seem to exist with open data, and what might be done about it. Specifically, we were discussing issues with extracting the planning alerts data from Sheffield council web site in order to provide a feed into the planning alerts database (http://www.planningalerts.com/). This led onto wider ranging discussions about what other data could be scraped from council sites, about the management and preservation of that data, and about best mechanisms for sharing and alerting based on that data.

From there things got quite abstract, as we identified other domains and projects that could benefit from a drop in component or service that bridged the gap between existing (Lets say Web 1.0) data silos and newer semantic web applications.

The SWG or Semantic Web Gateway Project is an attempt to abstract out the functions of a wide range of screen scrapers and other data extraction tools out there and bring them all together in a common management environment. Having collected them together in one place, have those agents will spit out RDF into a jena repository fronted by OAI and SRW services.

SVN repository and other stuff to follow soon.

Upcoming changes to the LOM Repository / Online Learning Portal Project

The learning resource portal is being revamped! There's lots of meat and potato changes needed to support the reporting of eLearning credits and the authoring of learning object metadata and loads of other cool stuff (Including an ajax based alternative to the fat swing based tagging tool, and a whole new revision of the tagging tool itself). However..... we've also got our eye in on a load of not so mainline developments to try and re-engage the community around the sharing of learning resources generally.... Here's some of the things on the list for the upcoming iterations...

* the portal itself will become a branded application of a generic learning object repository system. This will allow the core system for sharing learning resources to be branded in different ways for different communities. The current portal will continue to support it's target audience of teachers and learners, but because the underlying learning object metadata is generally applicable it will be possible to upload things like sound recordings of lecture notes, e-reserve materials, lecture notes, useful images and animations, lesson plans.. basically anything that a particular learning community wants to share. We can arrange repositories vertically, for example by domain/subject/keystage or horizontally, for example by media/medium or other useful aggregations.

* User tagging: One of the most exciting aspects of the new generic Repository - end user tagging and similarity detection. If you tag a resource, we'll be able to detect similarities with other profiles using the SVD algorithms we've been playing with, sorta like last.fm for learning resources. This kinda goes hand in hand with the user reviews that are coming as a part of the next release. Learners, Teachers and pretty much anyone who wants to can tag and share info in this way. We may toy with automatically exporting resources based on national curriculum specifiers (More generically controlled vocabs) to delicious tags using those tags, to try and capture more users into the portal itself. One of the best things about this is that we hope to be able to take trivial tagging, ID3 for example, and compliance test it to be able to create minimal lom documents. This means you could take a whole bunch of ID3 tagged mp3 lecture recordings, and expose them as, for example, JISC IE Conformant learning objects (More on content packages later).

* Simple tagging interface.. Yeah lom is cool, but not everyone wants to create huge lom documents, so the new online tagging interfaces will mean that people can catalog and upload learning objects without needing a doctorate in metadata and semantic ontologies. For now we've left out auto extraction of id3 tags from mp3's but it's on the cards in the near future.
* More web services - The new col portal already exposes all it's search functions as SRW/SRU based web services, we'll be exposing the tagging and other metadata functions for people to intergate their own applications with... we'll be swallowing our own medicine, with version four of the stand-alone tagging tool being able to consume XML LOM objects downloaded from portal, and then re-upload them in a round trip.

* Cross searching... well.. actually the app already does this, but we'll be creating a federated portal that can cross aggregate specific learning object Repositories, so we have our schools repository, but it would be nice to cross search some FE and HE repos too. We've also had interest from some projects creating video footage who might be interested in creating LOM records for learning video resources they have created and uploaded to utube. Cool :) So there will be some content in the FE portal at least.

* Object storage.. maybe in for the release, ability to upload resources, docs, video, sound recordings, etc as well as metadata.

Well.. just a taster for whats to come over the next 6 months of learning portal redevelopment. Hopefully iteration 0 will kick off around the 18th of june with iterations following evey three weeks.

An OAI-PMH Profile/Ontology for RDF objects in Jena

Jena is an open source RDF repository with pluggable back end storage modules and a modular front end RDF Query interface. Although the semantic web community has long advocated the use of RDF as both storage and exchange format for next generation of web applications, there are issues to be resolved before RDF could be used for projects such as the peoples network or curriculum online LOM repository. Specifically, there are two issues which I believe to be generic, but which jena helps us see in concrete terms. Firstly, to actually search the underlying structure there is a need to propagate both full text and spatial queries down to the statement store (Before any inferincing takes place, to select candidate statements) and there is a need to be able to access the contents of an RDF repository in a structured way (OAI-PMH). Both these issues don't need to be solved at the same time, if we can get a functional jena based metadata repository for cultural heritage, or learning objects started with a working OAI interface, then we can simply inject those records into a relational database for retrieval, using the base URL as a "Document Key" and retrieving the appropriate documents from the jena repository. There is also research work underway at the OS into accessing spatial indexes via the jena query interface. To my mind, extending jena with lucene indexes, and sidestepping the built in full text capabilities (Now present in all serious relational database systems) is an error beyond what knuth was talking about when he said "Premature optimisation is the root of all evil".

So, all that said, OAI and RDF repositories.. seems like a worthwhile thing to get working, and not too much trouble. Since an object in an RDF graph can be a member of an arbitrary number of classes, it seems to me that we should define a namespace and an ontology for objects to be shared through OAI-PMH that can be used for all RDF repositories. Any repository implementing the RDF QL and supporting the OAI-PMH ontology should be capable of acting as an OAI-PMH data provider. The properties of this class will need to contain (Or allow derivation of), the properties of the OAI Header record.

In theory, the OAI-PMH engine for RDF repositories should work over any RDF repository supporting the standard query mechanisms. It might be that this approach can extend beyond OAI-PMH and into the realms of OAI-ORE.


OAI-PMH Class for RDF should be incredibly simple, and therefore, it's benefit is in getting it defined at a high enough level to promote reuse. First impressions are that it should contain the following properties

Date Added
Date Last Modified
Date Deleted (Some flags to control deletion tracking needed)
OAI-Sets

The record identifier will be the URI of the base object. Format is determined by the classes of the object itself.

Next step would be to get this class formalised in some kind of Ontology Markup Language then try and build the repo under jena.... more to follow.

RDF and ePortfolios

Just needed to get this down before I forget... RDF & semantic web technologies generally have been nipping at the heels of several information retrieval projects for a while now. Every six months or so I check out and build the latest jena to see if we could actually build some of our IR systems using it, and it's always the same story: I start off really enthusiastically, but slowly start hitting walls that mean it's just not possible. This time around it was accessing native text and spatial indexes in my jena database backend. But.... We've been struggling for a long time now with OSPI and the SAKAI ePortfolio module and suddenly I can see an application for RDF and defined ontologies, and users being able to extend the data model in ways they want. It seems to me that jena-db could be exactly the right backend for a real usable ePortfolio system... Not sure where we'd get started building a beast like that tho.

LOTRO

A note for all mmorpg friends....

Currently playing on Laurelin (UK RP Server) with the following :

Whilat (There at the launch of three mmorpg's now... cool or what) elf loremaster
Draff - Human Hunter
Suwen - Elf Champion
Mirathanor - Elf Bard

And wondering if I dare upload screenies of me at the foot of wethertop to flickr ;) Guild name is "Núror Muinaréva" (Without the accents... I guess the text must all be US7ASCII) msg me ingame for invites :)

Random thoughts - JZKit3

After a morning trying to fit the SQI square peg into the SRW round hole, I'm having some thoughts about re-organising the search plugins and the aggregator service in JZKit3. It seems with the way the world is today, with alerters and users creating their own data feeds (The horrible, if cool pipes demo, which could be so much more, if only it worked). The problem we have with JZKit right now is that some of the plugins require oodles of configuration (JDBC/Relational Database Plugin) wheras others require nothing more than a url (Z3950 URL, SRW/SRU, etc). To create a simple search portal app thats easily installed, users don't want to have the grief of learning about relational database plugin config. We thought we cracked that nut in jzkit2 by having the plugins register their own config mechanisms, but the config woes persist. So, how about, after thinking harder about how we can work with SQI, we split the plugins into two classes, those that are URL configurable and those that aren't. The ones that arent need to be exposed as an SRW/SRU/Z3950 service in their own right, and are then aggregated by the simpler plugins. This *vastly* simplifies the config (Still have all the query rewrite stuff to deal with, but at least it cuts out the big problem, which is database config). This also fits with rewriting the jdbc plugin to use hibernate map based objects instead of our home-grown persistence layer. Sounds like a good direction for jzkit3.

oai-ore and open knowledge and other thoughts

OK, I've been reviewing the oai-ore work, mostly with one eye on whats going on in OKF, but also relating to other work k-intis involved in (http://www.openarchives.org/ore/). Bloody hell people.. if there isn't an opportunity for some "Disruptive" technology here I don't know where there is.... Storing and replicating actual digitial objects as well as their metadata seems like an ideal... the trouble is, many of todays "Digital Objects" are not discrete. They are composed of evolving streams of data such as map data, scientific data, or in the case of PN/IT For Me just a stream of records such as local council alerts. It's almost like we need a recusrsive oai structure where the metadata record sits atop each recursive entry, with the ability to freshen the objects below it....

Repository Use Cases, first thoughts

I seem to be suffering a case of bloggorhia...

Here are my initial thoughts about a set of use cases for an Open Source Repository that might suit the needs of a subsequent version of It For Me, Peoples Network, Seamless, or any of the Open Knowledge Foundation projects. It's just one of a thousand flowers that might blossom in the OKF community, and I've got specific questions of my own to answer outside the domain of OKF, but if there's the potential for reuse, why not exploit it.

These initial use cases are going to be used to focus attention for Spike 1 - In which I'm going to try and figure out if JENA is capable of performing as a back end for a several million item database. For the spike we'll use jena and the MySQL database. I've got a straight 8 million item database for MySQL, so can do some meaningful comparisons. The use cases should stand as useful outside the spike, but here's what they are for:

Terms:
PDWDA - Public Domain Work Detection Agent - A software module that uses a number of rules to identify public domain works and notify the repository of that data.

UC#1 - New Known Schema Resource (Sound Recording), with New Related Data (New Composer/Artist), via internal API (No web services)
In this UC A "PD Works Detection Agent" Submits a New Work by a previously unidentified artist/composer. We will be using a SoundRecording DTO object and the interface will need to call SoundRecordingDTO -> RDF, then insert the RDF, creating new SoundRecording and Composer/Artist data.

UC#2 - New Known Schema Resource (Sound Recording), with Known Related Data (Existing Composer/Artist)
As UC#1 but with reference to an existing Artist/Composer. We will deal with deduplication of errant composer/artist data in a later version. For now, identify via composer->person->normalised name,dob,dod.

UC#3 - Arbitrary XML Schema Submission
We'd like to be able to ingest arbitary XML without the need for code. This is going to require some kind of codified "Profile"... more to be filled out. Ideally, the system would hold the input document in a queue if the schema was unidentified until the administrator could create the profile. A central repository of profiles would be cool, so people could reference or download storage, indexing and dissemination rules. -I think we want more than just lucene style indexing tho... more structure is needed. Some jena/lucene crossover might be very interesting, and of broader scope than any of these projects individually-

UC#4 - Arbitary RDF Submission
Like 3 but for RDF.. Easy for the RDF engine, hard for the database engine (But retrieval performance goes the other way.. thats what the spike is for).

Public Domain Works Database - Thoughts

Just blogging this for info really. Apparently there are issues with access to the BL's music database, for checking works copyright status. I don't know if we can legitimately use the Library Of Congress instead, but I believe their public SRU/W server includes their music collections. Hence this query can be used to identify works of Bob Dylan. Interestingly the AAAF (The LC Name Authority File) Seems to contain much richer alias and pseudonym data for artists than the composer list, and my sample matched 100% for the data we were trying to find. it may be that the LC server is a good additional resource for checking resource status. Of course having identified the works getting hold of them could be a different problem.

OKF - Open Knowledge 1.0 First Musings

So, yesterday was the first OKF meeting at limehouse town hall in East London. I'm not going to try and report back each presentation blow by blow, others will do that far more accurately than I ever could. I did make notes about my "general feel" for the day, and I've got some specific thoughts on the level of cohesion between the diversity of all the projects presented. I guess my biggest concern is that there's lots of good intention, and lots of willingness to put effort in, but from what I could tell, nobody had really really started to grasp the nettles of interoperability amongst hugely heterogenous datasets. There's lots lots lots more to OKF than that, but because it's what I've spent most of my working life trying to deal with, it's inevitable that I see that problem everywhere I look, and that thats the problem area I'm most likely to be able to have a positive impact on. But.. my thoughts on the general feel will have to wait until I can decode my chicken scratch handwriting.....

What I wanted to get down, rather than going over the conf again, was how yesterday has changed my thinking.... My interest in OKF started because of huge links with work in projects such as seamless UK (Community Information for the People of Essex), The Peoples Network Discovery Service (A clearinghouse for cultural heritage resources funded under various digitisation programs), IT For Me (Public/Local information in south yorkshire), and a load more. These projects are all basically aggregators taking diverse sets of data from providers who don't always have a public interface, munging the data into a cannonical format, and then pushing it out again both via OAI, SRW/SRU and a web interface. Along the way, full text and spatial indexes are added to make the works searchable in lots of interesting ways. There are many similarities or links with almost all the projects of OKF. Where there's not a similarity in terms of sharing collections, theres a potential data provider link.. for example.. the planning alerts service would make a great feed for IT For Me and Seamless.

So.. how did yesterday affect my thinking.... Well, For Peoples Network we've been working on a new repository format. The current PN and IT For Me systems use a relational database as the repository. We have several "Filters" on the front end of the system that allows it to ingest many many different metadata schemas. We then cram this onto a single relational structure, doing a mapping job as we go. This kills two(Maybe even three) birds with one stone: The storgae and access is dealt with in one blow, once in the repository, we are set to search. once in the repository the records can be output in any form we can transform the canonical schema into.

I've been working on some filters to get the public domain works database into mysql so we can include the content in peoples network perhaps. But I'm worried about the diversity of data the OKF might generate and how much semantic density we might looks by cramming everything into one DC-like Schema.

What about RDF? This question has plagued me for a long time. Judging by some of the comments at the govt information presentation, it worries some of the conf attendees too ;). I've been a long time tinkerer with jena, since it's *very* early days. I never felt, however, that it was ready to have seven million objects poured into it and be able to perform at anything like the level our database could. it also lacks the full text and spatial operators we get for free in mysql. What it does have on it's side is a hugely expressive power.

So, after OKF 1.0 whats changed? I think maybe it's really time to seperate the repository and aggregation functions from the searchable index ones. It might be that we can make jena perform by adding full text and spatial indexing capabilities to the database backen. However, I don't think this can be a major goal. If whatever is (I) produce for the next peoples network data model or similar project is to be useful to the OKF community, it needs to separate out the concerns of storage and use. To do this, some architecture is needed. We need to start being able to store and distribute the "Knowledge" richness without loss of semantics. Selecting resources for inclusion in other indexing services is something else. I'm going to refactor some of the composer import code I wrote to create a RepositorySubmission interface, this thing needs to be able to let me make some choices later on about the MySQL / Jena backends, and we need to do a spike with several million records to see if we need to trade off semantic density for performance (And if we do, we need to split the repository into two seperate functions so this ceases to be an issue). For now, my interest is in generating a jena backend to the repository submission interface.

Exposing UK Cultural Heritage Digital Resources in Second Life

The Peoples Network Discover Service is an MLA funded service that aggregates content sources that deal with cultural heritage and other MLA funded activities, and provides a digital preservation service for the metatdata generated by such services.

This blog category gathers together my link research into how it might be possible to create an empty shell bulding in second life. The building would essentially be an empty museum-type structure with a console in the lobby. The idea would be to have a SL user enter an “Instance” (Given that I don’t even know if second-life could support such “Instances”, we are at first base here, although it might be an interesting topic for the SL open source program) and use the console to provide topics (Well, search terms really, but it would be nice to do something more advanced). Once happy with the kinds of results the user would select a go control and fill the museum with digital artifacts which they could then explore, and interact with.

Later stages…. there’s lots of work to even arrive at a proof of concept for this, but once sorted, here are other ideas I want to explore

• Abstract out the features and create a generic JZKit -> SecondLife bridge so that anyone using JZKit to expose their repository can expose that data in SL. Ideally, I’d like to be able to create vanilla search-houses and search-walls and search-pictures (you get the idea) that users can use in their own structures or place on their own land.


• Provide possible integration with e-commerce (Dependent upon license data in metadata). This would allow two distinct options -> Allow users to request prints of digital artifacts etc in the real world, and possiby more interesting to SL, allow users to download inages for use as textures and other SL resources.


• Organisation of the “virtual museum” could be interesting, how we categorise and structure the exhibit so it’s not just a “Relevance Ranked” list of stuff arranged throughout the shell of a building is going to be challenging.


• Providing some way for people to “Store” or “Share” pre-populated museum collections, and link them into their own structures. Perhaps this could be a bit like a saved search or and RSS feed for exhibits people can use in their own structures. In fact, a possible idea for SL commerce might be to provide a “Changable Picture” that users can buy to hang on the walls of their SL buildings. These pictures would be backed by a search of the MLA discover service and the content would change at a user specified interval, for example “Nottingham Lace Market” every 5 mins, could be hung in the lobby of a person or organisation connected to that area.


• This also provides a new opportunity to MLA.. the inclusion of interactive SL resources in the discover application.

A Bit About Me

Ok, here's the obligatory "About Me" post so that people who follow a link here from somewhere I've Registered can actually discover something: I'm an open source software developer (Actually, I part own a software company and officially my job title is director, but I still call myself a developer, and I'll be cold in the ground long before I ever introduce myself as MD).

My work interests center around information retrieval, information repositories, semantic and systems interoperability, systems integation and semantic web / text processing. I develop and maintain an open source toolkit JZkit for developers looking to access or expose information repositories using z3950, SRW/SRU or OpenSearch (Amongst others). On top of that there's a portal application called iNode, but I'll put up a projects category and make some entries for the individual things I'm involved with. I also maintain a really low level asn.1 to java precompiler and ber runtime called a2j which is used allover the place, apparently even in some voip software on mobile phones... Makes me wonder what I was doing when I lgpl'd that one ;). Sector wise, I work mostly in libraries, learning and public information, and recently I'm doing an alarming amount with vocabulary management, which seems to excite some people quite wildly, but not me.

"Academically" (Most people I know would never use that term around me I guess) my interests are mostly aligned with work, IR algorithms and text mining. I've always loved organisational cybernetics tho (Especially the work of Stafford Beer), and have a healthy (Semi-active) interest in general systems theory. I secretly hold a bit of an ambition to go back to research at least in some small way before I'm done, probably just part time. Work takes up most of my time at the moment tho, although I'm currently trying to get to grips with some bioinformatics and I'm reading genetics for dummies.

What little free time I have is split between My wonderful wife, who doesn't get nearly enough attention, my kids (2 boys aged 7 and 9), fun coding, and martial arts (I've sorta seriously practised HapKiDo and TaeKwonDo in the past, along with a superficial smattering of Aikido, Taijutsu and Iado, and I'm currently full on having fun with Sensei Chris Robins at Norton Dojo Traditional Goju Ryu Karate School, I'm trying to keep a dojo blog up to date.

Sometimes I read (Fiction: mostly sci-fi and fantasy, *very* rarely horror, last fiction I read was Excession by ian m banks, and before that The Algebraist. Non-Fiction just about anything. Currently I'm having a go at re-reading Sartre's classic existentalist text being and nothingness, my teeny IQ struggles a bit to keep all the words in my head, but it's quite rewarding on the hole (See what I did there, eh?). The last fun non-fiction I read was The Progressive Patriot Billy Bragg, and before that I read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, which whilst I mostly "Get" I can't say I enjoyed, mostly because whilst the man is clearly bright and passionate, he has the charm and grace of a pubic louse. A friend also gave me a copy of Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid: A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll which I sometimes take to the winter garden at lunch time in an attempt to look intellectual. I think the furrowed brow always gives it away.. or maybe it adds to the illusion. Next up I'm hoping to read On Formally Undecidable Propositions of "Principia Mathematica" and Related Systems Since it sorta ties together some of my interests in cybernetics (And metasystems as a means to resolve undecidable propositions) and the maths of GEB.

Sometimes I listen to music and I get lots of stick in the office about my marillion t-shirts and 47 minute guitar solos. Generally speaking, I'm shy rather than antisocial, so it's OK to speak to me if you see me out and about. I'm a Crab, but don't believe in any of that crap beyond the ability of believers to use it as a prompt for introspection (How I feel about most systems of belief really). Although I really like the The Desiderata of Hope by Max Ehrmann quote below, I did recently see a friends religions status listed as "I believe in people, not fairy tales", which I also like, although it's a bit strong for me personally, it does kinda sum up how I feel about certain things :)

Well, if you want to know any more you best talk to me :)

Peace,
e.

eRiders home page

Just blogging this for myself, as I keep loosing the url
http://www.eriders.net/index.php?module=articles

Tracking Fretties Blog

Started my tracking fretties blog..Here