OSB data in simple text format

I merged and tweaked a couple of example programs from the open source "shapelib" project for reading ESRI shape files, and Anthony ran the program over the OSB data to produce the text file in
http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/classes/08F/cis422/data/OSBShpExtract.txt

This is not in xml, but it's a very simple format that can be parsed with either a scripting language like Python, Perl, or Awk, or with Java's "tokenize" method --- each line can be identified by the first token on the line, and the important fields (x and y coordinates of points, in particular) are separated by blanks.

Of course no one is obligated to do anything with this data at such a late date, but there it is if you want to take a shot at it. Later (probably during holiday break) I'll see about making a version of the extractor program that produces XML in a form close enough to the campus map XML input files to "fool" the data readers you have produced.

This week: No lecture, meet in Deschutes room 100

Just a reminder: This week we will not have lectures. I suggest you use our scheduled lecture time for a group "code party" in room 100 Deschutes, integrating and trouble-shooting and filling in anything that still needs doing. I'll be there.

Data, again

Many thanks to Daniel, who apparently knows the magical incantations necessary to transform ESRI shapefile data into XML files. If you look in
http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/classes/08F/cis422/data/OSBxml/
you will find the full collection as osb_gis_xml.tar.zip or you can look in the osb_gis_xml directory to get individual xml files.

It's very late, and I understand if you are not able to incorporate this into your project before the deadline. On the other hand, it would be great if at least some of you could do so, or at least give it a try and document what problems need to be solved to make it work.

Update: I've looked through the XML data and I'm not so sure we're making progress. As near as I can tell, what we have is "PolygonB" objects that are represented as byte arrays (and I don't know how to interpret those byte arrays). It seems that "PolygonN" objects have a field called "Rings", which are arrays of (x,y) coordinate pairs, and that's what we were expecting. I don't know how to turn "PolygonB" objects into "PolygonN" objects. Maybe someone does?

OSB data? Please have a look

I have an XML file from Amy. It's one big XML file, rather than a file per layer, but maybe that's not a problem (??). As I eyeball it, though, it seems to me like the shapes are defined in a different way than in the campus map XML files ... it looks like there is a sort of hex encoding of sequences of coordinates, instead of XML-ish encoding of each coordinate pair. So, my best guess is that this will not work with the "generalized" input modules that you have worked on. But please give it a try, and let me know what you discover. Is there some obvious way to transform this XML into something we can deal with?

I also have the raw ESRI shapefile data, if anyone knows the ArcGIS program well enough to manage the XML export from that. (I don't, but I am beginning to see that it's something I had better learn.)

The XML file is at: http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/classes/08F/cis422/data/OSBdata.xml

Midterm grading progress

I've made a first pass through all the midterms now, and assigned tentative scores ... but I want to make a second pass through to make sure your scores don't depend too much on how warm my coffee was or what time of day it was when I read yours. I will probably need to "bin" them (group into rough equivalence classes given the same score) to avoid too much random variation in scores.

Generally I'm pretty pleased. Most of the midterms did draw from both papers, and thoughtfully applied them to the specific project descriptions. A few of the midterms were particularly creative or insightful. Some were a bit generic, describing only general goals ("encourage open communication") rather than concrete plans for meeting those goals. Many, I thought, underestimated the difficulty of precisely defining interfaces and reaching a common understanding of what Jackson calls "ground terms". That's understandable, and I think it's hard to grasp how slippery terms and interface definitions can be until you've had some (possibly unpleasant) experience working with others across organizational boundaries.

Midterm

There is just one question on the midterm, but it asks you to draw from both of the papers we read and discussed. (You can also draw from your project experience, but be sure to draw from the papers as well.)

The midterm is due at 5pm Wednesday, November 12. Turn it in by sending your answer as plain text in the body of an email message, using this link:
Turnin email

Your answer should be 500 words or less. (The question is 331 words, so the upper limit is about 1.5 times as long as the question.)

Here is the question:

Development project teams may be distributed between organizations for a variety of reasons. One of the reasons is to combine domain expertise from different organizations participating in a collaborative project. Here are two hypothetical* examples:

a) Nike and Apple are jointly developing "smart shoe" systems for runners. Sensors in the Nike shoes will interact with iPod music players designed and manufactured by Apple. The adaptor between the shoes and the music players will be jointly designed and implemented by a team composed of a shoe sensor design sub-team at Nike headquarters in Portland; a web interface team at Apple's headquarters in Sunnyvale; and a data acquisition sub-team based in Apple's Portland offices. Each sub-team includes experts in one part of the system.

b) Electrical Geodesics, Inc. is a small Eugene company that produces dense-array electroencephalograph (dEEG) devices for measuring brain activity. These dEEG devices can be used together with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) devices to obtain more complete data about brain functioning. Combining and visualizing the large data sets produced by these devices requires advanced image-processing algorithms running on parallel computers. A project team to build a prototype dEEG+fMRI combined visualization system is composed of a dEEG expert from EGI, an expert in neuroanatomy and an expert in fMRI imaging from the UO psychology department, a computer science professor, and three graduate students, one from psychology and two from computer science.

Pick either one of these examples for your answer. Suppose you have been asked to help organize and manage that example project. How will you apply lessons from the papers we read? Please draw at least some from both papers. Don't just repeat advice from those papers --- explain how you would apply it to the specific example you chose.

* Parts of these examples are pure imagination, but both are (as they say in the movies) "inspired by a true story". See:
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/may2006/tc20060523_569911.htm
http://www.egi.com/research-division-converging-neurotechnologies
I have no idea about the actual composition and location of the development teams.