Report of the Stanford Linked Data Workshop

The Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (SULAIR) with the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) conducted at week-long workshop on the prospects for a large scale, multi-national, multi-institutional prototype of a Linked Data environment for discovery of and navigation among the rapidly, chaotically expanding array of academic information resources. As preparation for the workshop, CLIR sponsored a survey by Jerry Persons, Chief Information Architect emeritus of SULAIR that was published originally for workshop participants as background to the workshop and is now publicly available. The original intention of the workshop was to devise a plan for such a prototype. However, such was the diversity of knowledge, experience, and views of the potential of Linked Data approaches that the workshop participants turned to two more fundamental goals: building common understanding and enthusiasm on the one hand and identifying opportunities and challenges to be confronted in the preparation of the intended prototype and its operation on the other. In pursuit of those objectives, the workshop participants produced:1. a value statement addressing the question of why a Linked Data approach is worth prototyping;2. a manifesto for Linked Libraries (and Museums and Archives and …);3. an outline of the phases in a life cycle of Linked Data approaches;4. a prioritized list of known issues in generating, harvesting & using Linked Data;5. a workflow with notes for converting library bibliographic records and other academic metadata to URIs;6. examples of potential “killer apps” using Linked Data: and7. a list of next steps and potential projects.This report includes a summary of the workshop agenda, a chart showing the use of Linked Data in cultural heritage venues, and short biographies and statements from each of the participants

Product Focused Freeform Fabrication Education

Presented in this paper is our experience of teaching freeform fabrication to students at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, and to high school students and teachers. The emphasis of the curriculum is exposing students to rapid product development technologies with the goal of creating awareness to emerging career opportunities in CAD/CAM. Starting from solid modeling, principles of freeform fabrication, to applications of rapid prototyping and manufacturing in industry sponsored product development projects, students can learn in-depth freeform fabrication technologies. Interactive course content with hands-on experience for product development is the key towards the success of the program.Mechanical Engineerin

Experiences in involving analysts in visualisation design

Involving analysts in visualisation design has obvious benefits, but the knowledge-gap between domain experts ("analysts") and visualisation designers ("designers") often makes the degree of their involvement fall short of that aspired. By promoting a culture of mutual learning, understanding and contribution between both analysts and designers from the outset, participants can be raised to a level at which all can usefully contribute to both requirement definition and design. We describe the process we use to do this for tightly-scoped and short design exercises -- with meetings/workshops, iterative bursts of design/prototyping over relatively short periods of time, and workplace-based evaluation -- illustrating this with examples of our own experience from recent work with bird ecologists

Building on CHASM: A Study of Using Counts for the Analysis of Static Models of Processes

Process modelling is gaining increasing acceptance by software engineers as a useful discipline to facilitate both process understanding and improvement activities. This position paper builds upon previous work reported at the 1997 ICSE workshop on process models and empirical studies of software engineering (Phalp and Counsell 1997). In the previous paper, we argued that simple counts could be used to support analysis of static process models. We also illustrated the idea with a coupling measure for Role Activity Diagrams, a graphical process modelling notation adapted from Petri Nets. At that time only limited empirical work had been carried out, based upon a single industrial study, where we found high levels of coupling in an inefficient process (a more thorough description may be found in (Phalp and Shepperd 1999)). We now summarise a more recent study, which uses a similar analysis of process coupling again based on simple counts. In the study, we compared ten software prototyping processes drawn from eight different organisations. We found that this approach does yield insights into process problems, which could potentially be missed by qualitative analysis alone. This is particularly so when analysing real world processes, which are frequently more complex than their text book counterparts. One notable finding was that despite differences in size and domain, role types across the organisations exhibited similar levels of coupling. Furthermore, where there were deviations in one particular role type, this led the authors to discover a relationship between project size and the coupling levels within that type of role. Given the simplicity of our approach and the complexity of many real world processes we argue that quantitative analysis of process models should be considered as a process analysis technique

Children’s Creativity Lab : creating a ‘pen of the future’

This work is funded by EPSRC and SICSA.Technology is changing the way we acquire new skills and proficiencies and handwriting is no exception to this. However, while some technological advancements exist in this area, the question of how we can digitally enhance the process of learning handwriting remains under-explored. Being immersed in this process on an everyday basis, we believe that school aged children can provide valuable ideas and insights into the design of future writing tools for learners developing their (hand)writing skills. As end-users of the proposed technology, we explore including children in a form of informed participatory design during a creativity lab where we invited 12 children, aged 11–12, to put themselves into the shoes of a product designers and create a Pen of the Future using prototyping materials. In this paper we describe our methodology and discuss the design ideas that children came up with and how these may inform the design of future writing tools.Postprin

Making meaning: developing an understanding of form in distance design education

Design education throughout the world provides students with a variety of experiences that help them develop an understanding of form and shape. The conventional model of such education requires students to participate in studio and workshop-based projects to develop skills through the creation of models and prototypes. However, with the increase in distance education worldwide we need to explore new ways for students to create and manipulate form remotely. This paper presents new work at the Open University, UK which set out to engage design students in form-making from a distance. Participants were given access to technical and design support that took rough sketches of chair designs and converted these into tangible scale models which were mailed back to the students. Several cycles of this activity generated data on how such supported modelling activity stimulated students' creative ability, design knowledge and motivation. This paper proposes new priorities for distance design education