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Exams are over

I had the final exam for my MSc on Tuesday, on the topic of GIS Management. It is strange to think that that was the last exam I will ever take as part of a formal education, one that has lasted 18 years of my life. Exams have never been a strong point of mine - instead prefering the use of coursework and other methods of examination - but they don't appear to have gone too badly.

Although the taught part of the course is now over completely, I still have the dissertation to do over the coming months. The title of the dissertation will be "Spatial analysis and representation of usage patterns for a web-based store finder system".

The first task I need to perform is to present my project proposal to the staff and other students in the department next Thursday. In order to do this I will need to start reading around the topic a little more to see what work has been undertaken already and try to structure my ideas for my own project. To help me organise the articles I will be reading over the course of the work I am trying out the Backpack online organiser which allows me to keep an online personal space to store all sorts of information. My first forays into the world of Backpack can be seen publicly on my MSc Dissertation References page. I may stop updating it as I'm only experimenting with the service at the moment but it is proving to be useful so far so the likelihood is I will continue with it over the summer.

Posted in Education at 12:36 PM on Thursday 19 May 2005 | Comments (1)
Tags: dissertation project references bibliography backpack

Sun sneezing questions

As I start to think about what I'm going to put on the sun sneezing part of the website, I began to think it may be a good idea to ask for the input of people who may actually use it. The main part of the site will be a sort of central register of sun sneezers that you can leave your details in (as few or as many as you wish) and in return you are given an electronic certificate of sun-sneeziness with a profile you can link to.

I know that there are a lot of people who have expressed an interest in it, so at the same time I'd like to be able to find out a little more about how sun sneezing habits change between people and places, if at all. This is where you come in... If there are any fitting questions that you think may be good to ask of people for their profile, I'll be more than grateful if you could let me know and I'll add them to my list. If you would like to leave any suggestions, please leave a comment at the bottom of this post or send me a quick email to dan at karran dot net.

Finally, apologies to all those people who have emailed me already to express their interest. I'll get back to you all when I have a better idea of launch timings.

Posted in Miscellaneous at 2:09 PM on Saturday 14 May 2005 | Comments (27)
Tags: sun sneezing sneeze

20 questions

Last month I was happily playing with a little electronic game of 20 questions that a friend of mine had. Basically you think up an object and after 20 questions with yes, no or maybe answers it will make a guess at the object you're thinking of. Most of the time it was right and the times that it wasn't quite there, it was pretty close. Whilst at the time it was a bit of fun, I didn't really appreciate the amount of time and effort had been put into teaching this machine what it knows. Apparently it started learning back in 1988 by adding to it's neural network memory. Since then it has had the most popular objects and inferences burned into a chip for use in this cheap toy. The toy itself can't learn but the game you can play on the 20q website is still teaching itself for every game that is played. I just tried it out and it guessed first time.

(via Boing Boing)

Posted in Miscellaneous at 6:04 PM on Wednesday 11 May 2005 | Comments (0)
Tags: 20q ai artificial intelligence neural net

BBC Backstage to be geo friendly

The BBC launched a website today called BBC Backstage which encourages people to find novel ways of reusing the content and services that are paid for using the licence fee that we all have to pay (although I don't because I don't have a television with me this year).

Among the latest prototypes which have been submitted by developers are better integration of the BBC News site with Wikipedia, tagging of stories using del.icio.us and an improved search for archived recordings of the Today programme. The data to do these things with is all provided in XML format, though some of the applications simply 'scrape' the site and make their own alterations where they want to. Something which would have been frowned upon until lately is now actively being encouraged in order to nurture creativity and innovation.

One of the most intriguing parts of this scheme is the plan to create a Postcoder API - a programming interface to postcode data held by the BBC. They haven't published the exact details of it but I suspect it will allow people to enter a postcode and have all relevant stories returned to the user. I doubt they will be able to return the actual co-ordinates of postcodes as that would undercut commercial services already in place and would almost certainly break any contract they have with the Royal Mail to supply the data.

A quick Google search on posctcode APIs from the BBC has just brought up a suggestion of this postcoding ability from October last year. Place name data from the BBC gazeteer data would be nice.

(via Boing Boing)

Posted in Geographic at 5:29 PM on Wednesday 11 May 2005 | Comments (0)
Tags: bbc backstage postcode api bbc

Tagging

Just a random thought in a break from revision, provoked probably by spending too much time enjoying surfing the Flickr website for brilliant (and fun) photos...

I've wondered for a while why I've not come across any articles that compare the relatively new phenomenon of tagging things on the internet with the similar - and now largely defunct - concept of using keyword meta tags to categorise web pages. Well, I hadn't read anything until I started writing this, at which point I tryed searching again because I was certain somebody must have compared them at some point. I soon realised that Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineWatch had mentioned it before along with others. There must be some in this long list of related readings that I simply don't have time to read at the moment.

Anyway, I do find it odd that I hadn't come across it before, with most of the things out there being a very positive look at the world of tagging. So far tagging seems to have worked pretty well, though that's how keyword meta tags started out, and look where they are now. I think probably one of the main reasons that tagging is working where meta tags have failed is that tags are in the view of everyone. Meta tags aren't in the public eye, they are hidden away, which meant that web page authors could stuff them with all sorts of irrelevant keywords just to drive up their traffic. If you were to spam the tagspace with irrelevant words, visitors would write the page from the start and find somewhere else.

While Danny Sullivan doesn't see the idea of tags helping searching on the internet, I believe it can and will. For a start, they are the main way of navigating sites like Flickr and del.icio.us, and without tagging these sites would not have grown to the size they are today. They have brought in a new way of navigating the vast amount of information which can soon be generated by a large userbase - but instead of searching, they concentrate on browsing.

Applying tags to the rest of the internet won't work in the same way because it hasn't grown up with these concepts, but I believe they can learn from the information gathered by sites that have employed tags from the start. By learning what tags are relevant to each other (see for example, the related tags list for 'blue' on Flickr: clouds, water, yellow, white, tree, orange, flower, pink, flowers, trees, reflection, window), a search company can start to group sites which are talking about certain subjects. The web page author wouldn't have to do any work at all because the search engines already know what the topic of the page is - this is what search engines specialise in already.

Hmm, conveying that random thought took more of my time than I'd thought, but I should get back to doing some work now. With only one exam down there are two left, but I'm starting to feel a little happier about them now that I've had some of the coursework back from the Easter break and appear to have done quite well.

Posted in Information at 8:52 PM on Thursday 5 May 2005 | Comments (0)
Tags: search tags tagging flickr del.icio.us technorati searchenginewatch