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 »

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Hardware we like and use

By Mark van Harmelen | Published: September 5, 2010

Here at Hedtek have a hardware thing going on, and have various faves. Sanity warning: This post is only meaningful to certain kinds of geeks!

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Personalisation is the supply of services and/or data based on a model of a user

By Mark van Harmelen | Published: August 21, 2010

As part of work commissioned by JISC from Sero Consulting and Hedtek I’ve come up with a broad, simple definition of personalisation:

Personalisation is the supply of services and/or data based on a model of a user.

Supply and model are interpreted broadly, to mean by a machine or human agent. Examples of human agency are personalised shopping, by one person for another,  and self-regulated learning, by someone for him/herself.

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Achieving the impossible

By Mark van Harmelen | Published: August 17, 2010

Increasingly austere times are upon us, and despite a degree of ring-fencing of the education budget after the 2010 election, the future for education in the UK looks increasingly grim. Today we see further confirmation of a rumour in HE circles, that there looks likely to be a large cut in Higher Education funding in the near future. Yet to rebuild the wealth of the nation, we need to radically improve the quality of our workforce. This depends on the education, not only of the current workforce, but also of future recruits.

Not only do we have to deal with future fiscal constraints, but we also have to deal with a future in a world that is characterised by ever-increasing change and consequent levels of uncertainty. We need the ability to both learn in changing environments, and to apply the results of that learning in those changing environments.

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Project award: fishDelish

By Mark van Harmelen | Published: June 8, 2010

We are very pleased to have a strong role in the fishDelish Project awarded to the  University of Manchester’s School of Computer Science by the Joint Information Systems Council (JISC). Our co-partners in the project include FIN Inc, a not-for profit NGO that has created and runs FishBase, a 400M hit per annum species-specific database.

The project is aimed at three targets:

  1. Putting a large portion of Fishbase’s relational data on the web as Linked Data triples. We anticipate, during the next nine months, putting more than 100M triples on the web. This has its own challenges, eg converting the relations we are generating (using R2D) with existing standards, making sure that copyright information is maintained, and not least of all, dealing with a large data-set.
  2. Building basic species pages from linked data, and providing a self publishing mechanism for collection and aquarium data
  3. Adding a live tutorial medium for SPARQL based on our open source iDoc documentation product

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Project award: ourWikiBooks

By Mark van Harmelen | Published: June 8, 2010

We are very pleased to have a role in the recently announced ourWikiBooks Project awarded to the Manchester University’s School of Computer Science by the Joint Information Systems Council (JISC).

The project will  investigate student authorship of textbook material: “OurWikiBooks will undertake co-development, with teachers and GCSE and A-level students, of a new digital collection of key concerns and knowledge in computing education.”  As part of this we will address teacher continuing professional development and the development of their identity as computing teachers.


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