Hedtek now has a dream team

By Mark van Harmelen | Published: February 2, 2012

It’s been a while, in fact a couple of years since Dave Workman and I decided that we wanted to employ more developers. As essentially a two person company, Dave and I used to bemoan how we couldn’t find anyone that we wanted to work with. From experience with one company we used to outsource to, we were all too aware of the negative effects that less than expert developers have on code and system quality. And all of the developers who we met and thought of as potential candidates were either happily working elsewhere, or simply didn’t have the right mix of technical skills.

But quietly and unannounced, Hedtek has been expanding over previous months.

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Third consecutive Jorum contract

By Mark van Harmelen | Published: February 2, 2012

Mimas at the University of Manchester and Hedtek recently signed the third consecutive contract for Hedtek to provide technical assistance to Jorum.

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Work in progress for Jorum

By Mark van Harmelen | Published: February 2, 2012

Jorum is a national repository that provides Open Educational Resources. Over the past five months, JISC has been funding Jorum to engage in extensive technical work aimed at bringing a better user experience to Jorum’s users. This post, adapted from a post written for the Jorum blog, describes work we’ve been engaged in to assist in bringing about this change.

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DSpace REST API testing

By David Workman | Published: November 25, 2011

While funded by JISC via Mimas, Hedtek has recently providing assistance to Jorum, the UK’s Open Educational Resources repository; this varies from architectural to development assistance that is aimed at transforming the Jorum user experience.

Jorum is built on the DSpace repository, and part of our work involves building a new front end to Jorum. For this we need an API to DSpace, and while, conveniently, there is the DSpace REST API [1] module available for DSpace, it has not been used with the version of DSpace that Jorum uses, and until recently, it had no automated tests available for it. Given the centrality of this API for Jorum’s future development, we have started developing a suite of automated tests for the API. This post discusses progress, and mentions where our tests can be found on github.

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#uniproj and #wikiquals

By Mark van Harmelen | Published: October 15, 2011

Here I am at the University Project weekend in London, sitting with Fred Garnett, blogging at the wikiquals table in the ‘Pro action cafe‘ where we are talking about learners self-organising and self-certifying their qualifications. We’ve just had a few rounds of people throwing around and discussing ideas of where wikiquals should go/be/do.

So as a record, simply a list of highlights of some of the things that came out of the sessions:

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COMP61511 and learning Ruby

By Mark van Harmelen | Published: September 18, 2011

This is a post that may disappear from this blog, it’s for COMP61511, a postgraduate course unit that we teach annually to postgraduate computer scientists at the University of Manchester.

This is a course that will be unlike any others you have done in your education to date; co-operative peer-assisted looms large: you end up working and learning co-operatively in teams.

The agile component of the course will have lab work in Ruby and RSpec. You learn the Ruby with some help from us, we teach you the fundamentals of how to use RSpec and then, again, you help yourself and others to learn.

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Recent and current projects

By Mark van Harmelen | Published: August 13, 2011

Over the last months we’ve been busy with a variety of projects large and small. This is a roundup of these activities, from strategy formulation, through feasibility and scoping work, to the construction of increasingly large systems. Read More »

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Playing with OpenURL Router Data

By Mark van Harmelen | Published: June 8, 2011

Tony Hirst recently posted on experimenting with processing a reasonably large data set with *NIX command line tools. The data set is the recently published OpenURL Router Data. Inspired by this post I wondered what I could hack up in Ruby to process the same data, and if I could do this processing without a database. The answer is that it is pretty simple to process…

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JISC personalisation projects survey and synthesis

By Mark van Harmelen | Published: January 9, 2011

Hedtek and Sero Consulting Ltd were recently commissioned by JISC to perform a survey and synthesis of the outputs of JISC-funded  personalisation projects. The results of this work appear at personalisation.jisc.ac.uk.

A total of 25 funded projects were examined. Project outputs included analysis, user research, prototyping, service development and examination of key technical and operational issues. The projects concerned were comprised fifteen major projects and ten rapid innovation projects. Read More »

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Scaling and productising MOSAIC search and recommendation services

By Mark van Harmelen | Published: October 10, 2010

van Harmelen, M. Scaling and productising MOSAIC search and recommendation services. 26 September 2010.

Commissioned by JISC, this document provides an architectural approach for MOSAIC search and recommendation services. The approach incorporates iterative cycles of development, where each cycle is preceded by an agile needs-driven approach to determine the next targets for implementation and roll out. Read More »

Posted in architecture, personalisation, projects, recommendation, search | Tagged | 2 Comments