Education

UK Universities Working on a Data Website to Provide Open Information

Written by Faizan Patankar

‘Big Data’ isn’t an amateur term. It is happening in the world. There are a number of start-ups that have applications and techniques to harvest big data to help the end user. This movement is predominantly in the US and most start-ups are focussing there.

I like big data and that led me to a bit secret, or so I would like to think, project about ‘Open Data’ hosted on data.ac.uk and other sub-domains under that umbrella name. Most important of them being hub.data.ac.uk

So far, from what I understand, data.ac.uk will provide data for all UK Universities and this data could potentially be used for commercial reasons. Nice move!

We need this big data to help students make a more balanced choice of a university. Analysing this data (which will be eventually available) could also throw light on some more trends.

What will be part of this data, I don’t know. But I look forward to it.

data.ac.uk logo

I don’t know why the Data Website is so quiet at the moment. Something like this should be promoted and the commercial world should know about it. There are so many start-ups and data analysing geeks who would be more than happy to start making custom applications and sites to harvest this data.

University of Southampton is hosting and managing the site and the project for now. The person in charge is Christopher Gutteridge. Christopher is “a System, Information and Web programmer, and part of the University of Southampton IT Innovation team.” He is also “the University Linked Open Data Architect; I designed, built and maintain http://data.southampton.ac.uk/ which is setting the pace for open data from organsations.” And yes, that is correct, there is a spelling mistake on the University of Southampton page about Christopher.I think it’s a pretty good idea – how it works out in the end is anybody’s guess, but I for one look forward to it.

Image Credit: data.ac.uk

University Data: hub.data.ac.uk

About the author

Faizan Patankar

I started Career Geek Blog in 2011 to share my experience in job-hunting. I now focus on careers industry and blogging is just a tool to share that info. Love hacking careers. During the day I focus on my hobby - Engineering.