Christopher Gutteridge

Contact Details

Email:

cjg@ecs.soton.ac.uk

Phone:

+44 (0) 23 8059 4833

URI:

http://id.ecs.soton.ac.uk/person/1248

Postal address:

B59, ECS, University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, United Kingdom

Work

I'm a System, Information and Web programmer. I manage the web team at the School of Elecronics and Computer Science of the University of Southampton.

Since Nov 2010 I've been tasked with facilitating Open Linked Data from the University of Southampton!

Open Linked Data

I'm active in the Linked Data Community and have many little projects. Some are entirely work-related. Others are just a hobby.

• I am the University of Southampton Linked Open Data Architect, our data site launched in March 2011.
• Open Org Grinder - a tool I'm developing to make it easy for organisations to publish standard RDF datasets without getting mired in what ontology to use.
• Open Org Project - a group working on how to create open linked data from organistations.
• Graphite - jQuery-like RDF Library for PHP
• RDF Browser and SPARQL Browser - very simple ways to get to grips with RDF data
• geo2kml - Web tool to convert geo: namespace RDF to KML
• rdf2json - Web tool to convert RDF (XML, n3, RDFa etc) into JSON
• Board Game Player
• data.totl.net - A collection of less useful datasets. I built these to practice my RDF skills. Some are mildly useful, others just plain silly.
• Event Programme Ontology - a way to describe conference and festival programmes in RDF, plus a tool to render them nicely as HTML websites, print posters and iCal.
• Grapite.js - an attempt to implement Graphite in javascript. Shout if you want me to finish this, it's about 8 hours work away from being really useful.

EPrints

I was the developer for versions 2 and 3 of a piece of software named EPrints which is helping make research more freely and easily available. I believe that this work is essential as it should improve the rate and quality of all research.

The EPrints project is now much much bigger than just me and has a number of staff. I remain lead developer, although most of the actual development work is being done by Dr. Tim Brody.

Web for Work

I'm the web projects manager for ECS, where we get enough freedom to keep it interesting, but have enough experts in their fields to keep me honest and challenged. Most people like our website. I always see the flaws. I'd be one of those parents who, before they visit, you spend ages getting your house standards compliant and then I'd be pointing out that they have an ambiguity in the labelling of their sugar and tea containers.

I'm webmaster for the Web Science Trust, which is a challenge as I have tried to make that site ooze castual best-practice in linked data. I built the website for the 2006 International World Wide Web Conference, assisted on producing the website for the 2007 Conference, and provided an EPrints Repository for www2009.

With Tony Hirst, a great blogger and nice chap, I set up SplashURL.net to make handy tools for displaying URLs visually, via tiny-url-ing them then display the results as giant text, and also as QR Codes.

sotech, Southampton Developers

I really wanted some kind of social events in Southampton for people interested in developing code and stuff. In the end I've organised it myself and started Southampton Developers. We meet every four weeks in a pub with wifi and nice beer. In Novemeber 2010 I helped run Southampton's first ever barcamp! (Lanyrd page

SoTech now has the SoTech Blog which aggregates blog posts from our community.

INBOX

As an experiment I've started a hourly log of the size of my INBOX, in a few months time I want to start seeing if there are any peak times I get (or clear) email. Please feel free to reuse this data under creative commons attribution license. cc-by.

totl.net

When we were younger a bunch of us set up the website Temple ov thee Lemur (aka TotL). It got slashdotted quite a few times back in the day, annoyed some journalists, and was linked from the SETI Homepage for six months. We actually, accidentally, gain a small income from the site referrals and to avoid argument we used it to sponsor a Gentle Lemur at Marwell Zoo. We used the change to sponsor a Rufus Whistling Tree Duck.

Cities

Cities is my pet MMORPG which I've been developing and running for a few years with help from my friends Hugo, Mike, Nick, Harry and Andy. It's the MMORPG nethack, if you will, but with some very bad jokes. It's free and developed as a hobby. There are around 700 accounts active within the space of a week. The game is pretty baffling at first, but there's a very extensive wiki which explains some of it. The code is now just over 111,000 lines of Perl.

T-Shirts

I have a weak spot for t-shirts, but please don't buy me any more. I don't have room to store the fifty I already own! Almost none of them are band t-shirts, but I do have a KLF (well K2) one and a Hafler Trio one. Don't worry, I don't expect anyone else to care.

Music

I can't play any instruments or sing or anything but it turns out that's not very important to having a popular band. Literally several people like our music. It helps if you throw rubber ducks at the audience to distract them from the actual sound. I also did vocals once for a band covering Dire Straights in the style of Throbbing Gristle. It was pretty dire.

Gimp Scripts

Back when I was little I wrote some script-fu scripts which made it into the release of GIMP (the open source graphics package). ASCII to Image, Camouflage, Coffee Stains, Distress Selection, Fuzzy Border, Old Photograph, Render Map, Spinning Globe, Tilable Blur. It might not be the biggest contribution to free software, but it's nice to think that a few bytes in every linux distro are mine.

Publications

"The greatest crisis facing us is not Russia, not the Atom Bomb, not corruption in government, not encroaching hunger, nor the morals of the young. It is a crisis in the organization and accessibility of human knowledge. We own an enormous "encyclopedia" - which isn't even arranged alphabetically. Our "file cards" are spilled on the floor, nor were they ever in order. The answers we want may be buried somewhere in the heap, but it might take a lifetime to locate two already known facts, place them side by side and derive a third fact, the one we urgently need.

Call it the crisis of the Librarian.

We need a new "specialist" who is not a specialist, but a synthesist. We need a new science to be a perfect secretary to all other sciences."

- Robert A. Heinlein, 1950.

"Today the forerunners of these synthesists are already at work in many places. Their titles may be anything; their degrees may be in anything - or they may have no degrees.

Today the are called `operations researchers', or sometimes `systems development engineers', or other interim tags. But they are all interdisciplinary people, generalists, not specialists - the new Renaissance Man. The very explosion of data which forced most scholars to specialise very narrowly created the necessity which evoked this new non-specialist. So far, this `unspeciality' is in its infancy; its methodology is inchoate, the results are sometimes trivial, and no one knows how to train to become such a man. But the results are often spectacularly brilliant, too — this new man may yet save all of us."

- Robert A. Heinlein, 1966.

"The Universe is a beautiful place, full of wonders... and it wants to kill you."

- Tyr Anasazi in the TV show "Andromeda".

"I'm not afraid to die," I said. "I'm not afraid to live. I'm not afraid to fail. I'm not afraid to succeed. I'm not afraid to fall in love. I'm not afraid to be alone. I'm just afraid I might have to stop talking about myself for five minutes."

- "When the cat's away." by Kinky Friedman.

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

- "The notebooks of Lazarus Long" by Robert Heinlein.

"One of the long standing benefits of being a sysadmin is that you get to act like a holy fool and speak truth to power and wear dirty t-shirts with obscure slogans because you know all the passwords and have full access to everyone's clickstream and IM logs."

- "Epoch" by Cory Doctorow.