{"id":1039,"date":"2010-10-14T15:21:39","date_gmt":"2010-10-14T14:21:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/?p=1039"},"modified":"2010-10-14T15:45:58","modified_gmt":"2010-10-14T14:45:58","slug":"use-of-microsoft-livelabs-pivot-in-a-library","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/2010\/10\/use-of-microsoft-livelabs-pivot-in-a-library\/","title":{"rendered":"Use of Microsoft LiveLabs Pivot in a Library"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This session by <a href=\"http:\/\/wit-ie.academia.edu\/DavidKane\">David Kane<\/a> from the Waterford Institute of Technology.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.getpivot.com\/\">LiveLabs Pivot<\/a> is a product designed to &#8220;interact with massive amounts of data in ways that are powerful, informative and fun&#8221; (quote from Microsoft) or &#8220;making sense out of mountains of data&#8221; (MIT Technology Review). Initially worked via a dedicated viewer, but now can be viewed in a browser.<\/p>\n<p>Pivot allows you to drill-down to specific items using faceted browsing &#8211; David demonstrates this with this <a href=\"http:\/\/content.getpivot.com\/Collections\/bingnewcars\/bingnewcars.cxml#%24facet0%24=Body%20Style&amp;%24view%24=2\">collection of cars in Pivot<\/a> provided by Microsoft (you need Silverlight installed to view this).<\/p>\n<p>At the Waterford Institute they used Pivot as a data analysis tool:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Downloaded data about 5,000 most &#8216;in demand&#8217; books from the library system (i.e. most under pressure rather than necessarily most borrowed &#8211; that is a popular book, but where there were many copies in the library would not be included)<\/li>\n<li>Then allocated colours to sets of books depending on level of demand (green through to red)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Gives way of visualising demand &#8211; and make case for additional copies etc.<\/p>\n<p>David mentions &#8216;<a href=\"http:\/\/code.google.com\/p\/google-refine\/wiki\/GettingStarted\">Google Refine<\/a>&#8216; which also allows visualisations of data.<\/p>\n<p>David shows another Pivot visualisation &#8211; looking at how books are distributed across different locations and library branches.<\/p>\n<p>What did he use to create the visualisations?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Microsoft PivotViewer<\/li>\n<li>Pivot Collection tool for Excel<\/li>\n<li>Miscosoft Visual Studio 2010 (for Silverlight)<\/li>\n<li>Silverlight 4 tools for visual studio<\/li>\n<li>Silverlight 4 toolkit<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>David shows online example at <a href=\"http:\/\/researchscope.net\/pivot\/beastquest\/index.php\">http:\/\/researchscope.net\/pivot\/beastquest\/index.php<\/a> &#8211; created using a Z39.50 connection to the catalogue and some PHP processing.<\/p>\n<p>Q: How could it deal with multiple languages?<\/p>\n<p>A: Can generate text in appropriate language &#8216;on the fly&#8217; and overlay on images. Also Sliverlight has some ability to provide text labels in appropriate languages<\/p>\n<p>Q: Interested in work on &#8216;high demand&#8217; items &#8211; does it have an application to &#8216;reading lists&#8217;?<\/p>\n<p>A: Good question &#8211; reading lists are something they are looking at currently in general, but haven&#8217;t considered how Pivot would be used.<\/p>\n<p>Q: Can you use Pivot to incorporate ebooks?<\/p>\n<p>A: Absolutely no reason why not. But if you wanted to merge collections that problem would need solving first &#8211; Pivot not doing this for you. But could use colour coding to differentiate ebooks from print books and so easily visualise where you have ebook coverage etc.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This session by David Kane from the Waterford Institute of Technology. LiveLabs Pivot is a product designed to &#8220;interact with massive amounts of data in ways that are powerful, informative and fun&#8221; (quote from Microsoft) or &#8220;making sense out of mountains of data&#8221; (MIT Technology Review). Initially worked via a dedicated viewer, but now can [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[57],"class_list":["post-1039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-ili2010"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1039"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1039\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1041,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1039\/revisions\/1041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meanboyfriend.com\/overdue_ideas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}