And so my project in Swindon begins to take on twilight properties as things draw to a natural conclusion.<\/p>\n
It’s difficult to write about work and the people I meet – confidentiality agreements, Official Secrets Act – these things conspire to make openness and communicating difficult<\/em>.<\/p>\n But there is one project that I can talk about.<\/p>\n It went live yesterday, 08.00 on 28th May 2008.<\/p>\n It’s a public-facing application (.NET front end, Oracle database on the back end) that draws input in manual form and – via system interfaces – from a range of corporate applications.<\/p>\n It was designed and developed by the web team here who are – it has to be said – exemplary in their approach to any problem and are endowed with standards of professionalism that exceed industry standards.<\/p>\n Andy is an excellent manager; Rich, his lead developer, is worth his weight in gold bars. The concept behind the project was to provide an information system which members of the public, academic researchers and scientists from across the world, government departments, industrial scientists and all sections of the media would be able to interrogate, to view case studies and the outputs of peer-reviewed scientific research-based projects.<\/p>\n These research projects would have been active in each of he organisation’s component parts; British Antarctic Survey<\/a>, British Geological Society<\/a>, Centre for Ecology and Hydrology<\/a>, Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory<\/a>, and all of the many participating collaborative centres and research institutions so valuable to this work.<\/p>\n This application enables users to filter and interrogate the raw data in a variety of ways, and with a ground-breaking degree of transparency.<\/p>\n Users are also able to scale down through the information to a level of granularity that even goes in to detail about the grant funding information for each project.<\/p>\n I’m convinced that over time, the content will expand to provide a massive resource of searchable scientific output – a concept which speaks for itself as to its practical application; there are so many ill- and partially-informed folk in the world, how could this be a bad thing?<\/p>\n I would have liked to have rolled this project out to the other scientific research councils, but sadly that degree of work falls well outside my brief.<\/p>\n So it’s a large pat on the back to everyone involved in the Science Impacts Database at the Natural Environment Research Council.<\/p>\n You all deserve it.<\/p>\n B<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n (project manager, NERC)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" And so my project in Swindon begins to take on twilight properties as things draw to a natural conclusion. It’s difficult to write about work<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff","two-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=570"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/570\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nThe project was conceived and championed by Dr Faith Culshaw, a free-thinking academic capable of seeing the potential benefits and not shy about owning<\/em> the idea through to delivery.<\/p>\n