I’ve just got back home from a rather wonderful week away at the JISC Developer Happiness Days (dev8D), getting a life (of a sort?!;-) so now it’s time to get back to the blog…
My head’s still full of things newly learned from the last few days, so while I digest it, here’s a quick taster of something I hope to dabble a little more with over the next week for the developer decathlon, along with the SplashURL.net idea (which reminds me of my to do list…oops…)
A glimpse of shiny things to do with JISC project data (scraped from Ross’s Simal site… [updated simal url] (see also: Prod).
Firstly, a Many Eyes tag cloud showing staffing on projects by theme:
Secondly, a many Eyes pie chart showing the relative number of projects by theme:
As ever, the data may not be that reliable/complete, because I believe it’s a best effort scrape of the JISC website. Now if only they made their data available in a nice way???;-)
Following a session in the “Dragon’s Den”, where I was told by Rachel Bruce that these charts might be used for good as a well as, err, heckling, I guess, Mark van Harmalen that I should probably pay lip service to who potential users might be, and Jim Downing’s suggestion that I could do something similar for research council projects, I also started having a play with data pulled from the the JISC website.
So for example, here’s a treemap showing current EPSRC Chemistry programme area grants >2M UKP by subprogramme area:
And if you were wondering who got the cash in the Chemistry area, here’s a bubble chart showing projects held by named PIs, along with their relative value:
If you try out the interactive visualisation on Many Eyes, you can hover over each person bubble to see what projects they hold and how much they’re worth:
PS thanks to Dave Flanders and all at JISC for putting the dev8D event on and managing to keep everything running so smoothly over the week:-) Happiness 11/10…
OUseful.Info, the blog... 
This is great stuff. With respect to the JISC data being in a better form than screen scraping. I’m pleased to say that there is progress in this area. We expect to be able to make a fully accurate database available, provided from JISCs own Programme Information Management System (PIMS) on a monthly basis.
We (OSS Watch) are currently in the process of reverse engineering the database dumps they are providing and writing an importer. Once that is complete Simal (http://simal.16degress.com.au) will provide the data in whatever format is needed for people doing automated work like this. The data will be updated on a monthly basis to ensure it remains current and accurate.
Other projects, such as PROD (http://prod.cetis.ac.uk) are focussing on nice human interfaces to the data.
It’s all moving in the right direction.
I forgot to mention, once we have importers for the JISC data we will be talking to the research councils to try and get their data too. Watch this space (http://simal.googlecode.com)
@ross :-)
re: “once we have importers for the JISC data we will be talking to the research councils to try and get their data too.”
so of the course the API needs something **easy** for me to say – just give me a dump of JISC projects, just give me NERC, EPSRC, etc ;-)
Just by chance, do you know anywhere that provides mappings of UK HEIs to the Government office region they are located in? If so, it should be easy to identify which projects are led by which HEIs (keyed on the HEI homepage URI would be handy – eg http://www.open.ac.uk/ – these are nice to pivot around;-) and then map these to see how much funding money is going into each GOR?