Trends and Transients

Over­view

Each year there are more new tech­no­lo­gies to keep track of, more ways to organ­ise your life and your company’s inform­a­tion, more ways to com­mu­nic­ate. This ses­sion will intro­duce you to new tech­no­lo­gies, dis­cuss older, under-appreciated tech­no­lo­gies, and enter­tain you at the same time. Our expert speak­ers will debate cur­rent issues and tech­no­lo­gies, giv­ing you the bene­fit of their wide exper­i­ence and dif­fer­ing points of view, so you can decide for your­self which tech­no­lo­gies will meet your needs and which are a waste of your time.

Classes for 2011

DITA, S1000D, and other Chal­lenges in Tech­nical Inform­a­tion Management

Taught by Joe Goll­ner.

This ses­sion will look at the state of the art in tech­nical inform­a­tion man­age­ment and explore the dif­fer­ent ways that XML is being lever­aged. Spe­cific atten­tion will be dir­ec­ted towards intro­du­cing and eval­u­at­ing two stand­ards that have arisen to prom­in­ence in this domain – S1000D and the Dar­win Inform­a­tion Typ­ing Archi­tec­ture (DITA). Asso­ci­ated with each stand­ard are a num­ber of prac­tices that have proven con­sist­ently use­ful and that can be pro­duct­ively deployed in other indus­tries. There are also a num­ber of chal­lenges asso­ci­ated with each stand­ard that reoc­cur with dis­turb­ing fre­quency and that merit fur­ther inquiry by all those with a stake in imple­ment­a­tions that are both effect­ive and sus­tain­able. Recent case stud­ies will be used to fore­ground the busi­ness con­text within which the eval­u­ation of these stand­ards can be mean­ing­fully con­duc­ted. The ses­sion will con­clude a dis­cus­sion of the more gen­eral themes stirred up dur­ing the eval­u­ation of S1000D and DITA within the con­text of real projects.

Mobile is not The Future (It’s Now)

Taught by Jo Rabin.

Google says that their mobile traffic grew more than four times in a year and that already over 15% of their traffic comes from mobile in many cat­egor­ies of search, sub­stan­tially more in some. That’s one in seven searches, and is con­tinu­ing to rise. How many com­pan­ies put one sev­enth of their resources into mobile? We will take a look at cur­rent ana­lysis and trends in the mobile arena, why it’s import­ant to have a strategy and why mobile needs a dif­fer­ent approach to tra­di­tional Web deliv­ery. We will sur­vey the latest think­ing as to how to approach the chal­lenge of mobile and open the lid on some spe­cific ques­tions, such as Web vs Apps, how to address the vast range of device cap­ab­il­it­ies and more … Warn­ing: everything is mov­ing very fast and while the answers are emer­ging they are chan­ging too — what’s clear is that the time to engage is now!

Lunch

Open Data in Action

Taught by Tim Dav­ies.

The last three years have seen a dra­matic growth in the atten­tion paid to open data, with gov­ern­ments, char­it­ies and com­pan­ies all explor­ing how open data can drive innov­a­tion, account­ab­il­ity, eco­nomic bene­fit and the trans­form­a­tion of ser­vices. This talk will briefly explore the his­tory of open data, unpick­ing the dif­fer­ent trends that have got us to where we are today, before look­ing at what open data is, and tak­ing a prac­tical look at ways dif­fer­ent organ­isa­tions and indi­vidu­als are cre­at­ing and using open data. Using case stud­ies from the Open Data Cook Book, Aid­In­foLabs and a range of other pro­jects the talk will identify oppor­tun­it­ies and chal­lenges for using open data. There will be a bit of XML, plenty of CSV, a sprink­ling of linked data, but strictly no PDFs.

Apply­ing XML and semantic tech­no­lo­gies to lib­er­ate infec­tious dis­ease data

Taught by Pro­fessor David Shotton

Des­pite the sig­ni­fic­ant med­ical advances of the second half of the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tury, infec­tious dis­eases con­tinue to rav­age trop­ical coun­tries, which have lim­ited access to the sci­entific lit­er­at­ure that would assist them in com­bat­ing dis­ease. This talk will illus­trate how open pub­lish­ing using XML and semantic web tech­no­lo­gies can lib­er­ate inform­a­tion from bio­med­ical research journ­als, cur­rently locked behind the sub­scrip­tion bar­ri­ers of com­mer­cial pub­lish­ers, for the bene­fit of health-care pro­fes­sion­als world­wide. Top­ics covered will include semantic pub­lish­ing – the semantic enrich­ment of on-line XML journal art­icles employ­ing the SPAR (Semantic Pub­lish­ing and Ref­er­en­cing) Onto­lo­gies, provid­ing bib­li­o­graphic ref­er­ences as Open Linked Data, and cre­at­ing easy-to-use Web-based metadata entry forms based on XML mod­els and min­imal inform­a­tion stand­ards, in order to cre­ate struc­tured digital abstracts sum­mar­iz­ing infec­tious dis­ease journal art­icles in both human– and machine-readable form, that can be pub­lished in instant access data journ­als and as open linked data, for free use.

Fac­ulty Light­ning Talks (after dinner)

Our Fac­ulty mem­bers work on many dif­fer­ent pro­jects and have a large range of interests. In this ses­sion, some of them will intro­duce you to these inter­est­ing pro­jects. We will use the ignite format (5 minutes, 20 slides, slides are auto­mat­ic­ally advanced) with short breaks between each talk. Expect a lively session!