Hello all,

Just to introduce myself as Project Manager of Erewhon/Mobile Oxford
project here at Oxford University (Alex Dutton's colleague).

Also to reiterate that we're planning on open sourcing the software
the underlies Mobile Oxford and are shortly due to implement our first
"extra-university" installation over at Oxford Brookes. We're very
keen to see our software deployed in various other Universities and
would be delighted to hear from anyone who would be interested in
doing likewise (and bear a possible cost savings over commercial
entities such as CampusM).

If you haven't checked it out so far head over to:
http://m.ox.ac.uk
on your mobile or desktop to see what it does.

Our Plan:
- Find partners who would like to deploy the software that underlies
Mobile Oxford (to be renamed)
- Develop an open source community around said software,
improving/fixing the software and reducing work for everyone.
- Add other Open Source projects like ours to a central repository and
develop a larger community with several programming language bases
allowing greater flexibility of deployment etc.
- Profit!/Win.

Best wishes,

Tim

Tim Fernando
Project Manager - Erewhon & Mobile Oxford
Oxford University Computing Services
[log in to unmask]
+44 1865 283348





2010/1/12 Alexander Dutton <[log in to unmask]>:
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> I'm part of the JISC-funded Erewhon project[0] at Oxford University
> Computing Services, which is due to finish at the end of March.
>
> The project has two main software deliverables:
>
> The first is Gaboto, a tool that enables us to model the locations and
> political relationships of entities within the University. Specifically,
> it generates a Java object-relational mapping on top of an RDF store,
> which we've rolled up into a RESTful web service[1]. This is developed
> under a BSD license and hosted with SourceForge[2].
>
> The second is Mobile Oxford[3], a mobile portal for the University,
> written in Python and built on Django[4]. The site grabs data from other
> sources and re-presents it in a format suitable for MIDs. At the moment,
> we have:
>
> * contact search (currently a scrape of our main website)
> * maps, including:
> * * University entities
> * * amenities from OpenStreetMap
> * * bus stops with real-time information (NaPTAN and OxonTime)
> * library search (Z39.50 interface)
> * podcasts (pulled from OPML feed)
> * news feeds (various RSS feeds)
> * service status (supplied by RSS feed)
> * webcams
> * weather (BBC)
>
> We're also in the process of adding Sakai VLE integration using OAuth,
> and events data from various sources.
>
> We use Gears and HTML5 for positioning, and WURFL for device detection.
> We use the WURFL capabilities information to generate static maps of the
> correct resolution for the target device, and to resize webcam and news
> item images on the fly.
>
> Once the project ends we're looking to continue development and
> open-source it. We'd quite like to build a community around it, and
> currently have plans to work with another institution to genericise it
> and deploy it at their University. If you're interested in taking part,
> we'd be glad to hear from you.
>
> Alex
>
>
> [0] http://erewhon.oucs.ox.ac.uk/
> [1] http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/oxpoints/index.xml.ID=body.1_div.2
> [2] http://sourceforge.net/projects/gaboto/
> [3] http://m.ox.ac.uk/
> [4] http://www.djangoproject.com/
>
> - --
> Alexander Dutton
> Erewhon Project Officer | m.ox.ac.uk developer
> Oxford University Computing Services, ℡ 01865 (6)13483
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