What we’ve been doing at Hedtek

Our last post was way back, during ALT-C. Since then we’ve been totally heads down, working on projects for clients and on our own PLE Project.

The JISC-funded MOSAIC Project, with SERO and co-partners Ken Chad (Ken Chad Consulting) and Paul Miller (Cloud of Data) investigated, at many levels, a new social and personal search approach to library catalogues for learners. This breaks new ground, by providing social search facilities based on attention data that is encapsulated in library loan information. The project and the prototype we provided produced some really good outcomes, with JISC promoting the outputs in various meetings, and commissioning a bit of further work to see how the MOSAIC search approach can be progressed in UK Higher Education. You can try our prototype at mosaic.hedtek.com (this will move to http://demo.mosaic.hedtek.com and I’ll edit this post and remove this comment then).

The iCue project also produced interesting and useful results for client Mimas. We were tasked with the development of an algorithm to help structure the 70M record Copac database, which contains details of the the holdings of some +/-40 UK university libraries. The end aim was to provide a better search experience for Copac users. The standard way of doing this is to use a scheme based on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) approach. Using a three level FRBR approach (such as e.g. used by WorldCat Local)  we developed a FRBRisation algorithm, prototyped and refined it, and provided a first level mockup of structured search facilities.

We’ve also been working hard at improving the Manchester Personal Learning Environment (the Manchester PLE). Last September I used it to support my Interactive System Design course (with a cohort of 80 students attending the University of Manchester ‘s MSc in Advanced Computer Science). This threw up some bugs and identified a lack of support for teachers when the PLE is used in an institutional setting. We fixed the bugs, performed some code refactoring, vastly improved the user interface, and added support for teachers by providing any PLE suer with the ability to set a blog based assignment. Friends Sefol re-implemented the spaces for us, concentrating on reliability. Finally we feel we are ready for a public release.

Dave also implemented the marvelous iDoc system for the Manchester PLE, where we are going to mostly use it to host short (much less than a minute) help videos. iDoc is designed for user generation of help information, and for user comments on that help information. It can also be restricted to ‘expert’ named users writing the main body of the documentation, with others adding the comments only. It can be used with any application, particularly where the authors of that application want help buttons to deep link to particular help information. If you don’t know what deep linking is, the effect is to click a help button for xyz while trying to do xyz, and being taken directly to the help for xyz. But once you’re there, you can browse around the other help information. We’ve decided to open source iDoc. This text will become a link to a post to iDoc.

iDoc was our first venture into Behavior Driven Design (BDD). And, from an engineering point of view, the experience was massively successful. We’ll post on that later. Dave open sourced a ruby gem in the process. We did two of four planned iterations, so there are still additions to come to iDoc. However its eminently usable now, and we have, bar the the copyright notices, an Open Source product in iDoc. Try it out at  demo.idoc.hedtek.com, and get the source via source.idoc.hedtek.com. (Both coming soon, I’ll remove this bracketed comment when these links go live.).

.