21.Jul.2008 LRUG Meeting Acts as Xapian & Rabbitmq

In the latest installment of the LRUG meetings, there were 2 speakers who speaking about two different projects. The first was a developer from mysociety.org; a website which provides a service to the public.  Users can request from the freedom of information act; data regarding any government body through the use of an online form.  The reply (with the information provided by the relevant body would then be automatically published online for the general public to view as well as the original requester).

Ruby and Rails was used to power the email request form and track the reply.  Acts as Xapian was the main focus of the talk and from what I gathered this was a component which provided a full textsearch with databse management of data for users.  This is similar to googles suite of tools avialable to web masters but the data is a lot more flexible when obtained though acts as xapian – you can do more with it.

Crowd sourcing was mentioned twice during the presentation firstly in the project of finding the email addresses of all local authorities.  This was achieved through listing the data that was needed in google docs spreadsheet, allowing global edit and inviting people to filol in the missing data.  The second example involved a website in New Zealand which had a basic somewhat crude method for indexing text with video from Political speeches.  The current standard was using time stamps to roughly match video with text of the speeches.  This was not very accurate but worked well.  What the site did was crowd source a more accurate way of matching text and video and allowed users to add extra time stamps to closer match the text and the video.  This worked well and a value for end users was that the site provided a type of league table for contributors.  This is an interesting device which encourages users to contribute more so they move up the league table.

The second presentation involved the Rabbitmq messaging system.  The origins of this messaging system lie in the banking sector and it was interesting to see how new protocols can evolve though specific needs and then be applied to other work with a little tweaking