Linked Data

In this weeks blog entry I will talk about Tim Berners-Lee's (original creator of the World Wide) new notion of Linked-Data. We were introduced to this topic in our last IAD session on the 20th October.

The main idea of Linked Data involves sharing and linking data together. Every user puts their data up on the Internet and related data gets linked together. This is basically the concept of Linked Data. It's useful because it makes it easier for people to find information, but most of all, all the data put up on the web by people can be gathered, combined and transformed into something much more useful.

We looked at the GapminderWorld web application on gapminder.org. This application illustrates the useful benefits that can be obtained using Linked Data. This application makes use of a lot of different data about global developmentfrom various different sources and combines them together and produces a useful and easy to understand graphical presentation.



Tim Berners-Lee On Linked-Data



The above is a video taken from the TED website. Tim Berners-Lee Explains Linked-Data in a really good and non-technical way. He explains amongst other things, that there will be a collection of data on the Internet, i.e. a database and as a result of Linked-Data they will be interrelated. Data providers will obviously include the general public, the Government and even private companies such as pharmaceutical companies. Benefit from Linked Data can be, e.g. in research, the data from millions of people can be vary useful.

Week 3

In this weeks session we started off by looking back at the Web Development and Evaluation tools, available ( here ) introduced to us in week 2. At the end of week 2, we were asked to look at these tools in our own time. I looked at the WAVE tool. We all did a presentation, briefly going into what development/evaluation tool we each looked at in our own time.

We also had a look at what other web development and evaluative tools we could add and extend to the list of tools, such as the WayBack-Machine, which is a tool that stores archives of websites dating back many years in the past. For example, one could see how the Google search engine looked like back in the year 2004.

Finally Rob Stevens gave a talk about presentations, i.e. guidelines and best practices. This coupled with research I conducted in my spare time will be very useful in giving presentations, which we will have to do as part of our coursework for this module. There are various steps one can take in order to give a successful presentation. These steps include:-

Preparation/Organization

• know the material and content being presented in detail - (Highlight on key points that will draw in your audience.)

• Know your Audience - (Your presentation needs to be tailored to your audience. I.e. presenting to an audience of engineers would be vastly different than presenting to an audience that doesn't know anything about the subject matter.)

• Practice and rehearse -(Practice all the time, at home, school, work, in front od a mirror, on friends or family, record video/audio of you doing the presentation and evaluate yourself.

Content
The presentation it self must consist of four parts, i.e. an opening, body, summary and an ending. People usually combine the ending to the summary part of the presentation, so really it is 3 parts.

• The Opening -(The opening of the presentation sets the stage for what is to follow. This section should be reserved for introduction, who you are and purpose of presentation. A very brief summary or an outline of the points you will be covering should also be presented in this section)

• The Body -(This is the section where the bulk of the subject matter is presented to the audience.)

• The Summary -(This section should be used to summarize and emphazise the main key points of your presentation)

The best way to think of these parts, is best summarized in the old axiom "Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them".

Week 1-2

In my first entry for this module, I will cover the first two lessons in the Internet Applications Development module. In the first session, we were introduced to the module (i.e. what it's all about, etc). My expectations for the module was that (as the name suggests), it would involve a lot of practical/hands-on development tasks and projects. To my surprise this proved untrue (at least for this semester).

I discovered that we would actually be tought a lot of the theory side of web development in this module, which I believe will be highly beneficial to us in the long run. In this session I found out we were doing some presenting and group work. We got split into groups of four and given the task of doing a review of a specicif website. We looked at the stakeholders and the functional facets of the website. We each took a specific functional facet to review.

The second session was the presenting day, i.e. the day we would be presenting our finding to our tutor and the rest of the class. This was a very brief task/presentation but nonetheless very useful one. I learned when doing a review that it's best to first do a Stakeholder analysis, this identifies everyone who is involved ranging from the owners to the target audience. Once the target audience is identified the website can be reviewed to determine if it meets their information needs. I also learned all the several functional facets one can use when reviewing websites, I will definately put them to good use in the projects to come.

We also had a look at what tools we can use in our reviews, for example accessibility tools (such as the WAVE), colour blindness tools (such as the Vischeck), etc. These are very useful tools in reviewing websites. The full list of tools we were introduced to can be found on this link | Tools |. This weeks session concluded with us discussing the first project for this module, which is a Reflective Review (i.e. this blog). There is also an upcoming project which is a website review. For this project we are required to choose a website genre to review, for example Music, Game, Travel and Academic websites. I have chosen to review Movie websites.

Intro

Hi I am Farah.

I created this blog for the Internet Applications Development module that I am undertaking at the University of the West of England. I will be using this blog to document my learning, thoughts and progress made throughout this year.