Posts by Christopher utteridge

Southampton Uni shows way to a truly open web

Accusations of numptiness

nah, just in the context of scholarly communication and of communicating data. Getting data as a table in PDF really really sucks.

Using PDF in the current era of many sizes of viewport is just plain daft.

Easy to Groom

Sir, I have been accused of many things, being easy to groom is generally not one of them.

Why I hate PDF

To be fair most things suck in some ways, but I've spent the last 10 years working to give people open access to research papers, and I hate the fact that PDF is the defacto standard. We should be able to read them easily on phones, ipads and kindles and we can't. But there's top men working on it http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2011/03/11/scholarly-html-theme-and-presentations-today/

Not everyone can code; and you need a coder, or other unusual skills to get the value from open data, but once the app (or whatever) is produced, we can all benefit. An information shamen is one of those rare people who can (a) understand complex diverse data sources and (b) is willing to build tools to help the other 99.9% of us benefit from them.

Some of our students produced this tool from the open data we made available:

http://opendatamap.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

(requires a recent browser!)