SIR Training and Conference

19th June 2009, Institute of Education, 55-59 Gordon Square, London

There will be further information on this page nearer the conference. Please check again later.

Provisional Programme

Day	Start	End	Event	Speaker
Friday
	0930	0940	Welcome	Dave Doulton
	0940	1215	Training	John Lemon
	1215	1230	AGM
	1230	1330	Lunch
	1330	1630	Training	John Lemon

The training will be given by John Lemon from Aberdeen University and will be as follows:

The training will use data from a ongoing project at the University of Aberdeen, which started on 1st August 2008. The project has been designed to collect data on the use of a number of facilities provided for students to determine the level of demand and where resources need to be expanded or possibly re-deployed. The data is extracted from the student registration system and from a number of daily log files which include those generated by:

· The servers which control access to the wireless access points; these cover the whole University including halls of residence.

· The teaching classrooms access logs which controls access to the teaching systems, recording who logs in, where and for how long and covers a total of 1200 PCs.

· Software licensing servers for the 200+ packages installed on the 1200+ machines.

The task you will be set is to add the data from another set of log files and then answer a number of queries from the merged data set. You will be provided with a one weeks subset of the data base ( with all identifying data removed ) and the new data in a number of different formats. The different formats will allow for different skill levels from beginner to expert.

You will need to create a new record schema for the data ( the existing schema definition will be available for download prior to the workshop ) and then add the data. For those who want an ‘easy’ life there will be a fixed format file or a CSV format file, for others who want to import records via ODBC an Excel file, and for those who want to try reading from a non-standard format file there will be examples of the raw log files.

Once you have added the data you will need to write a number of retrievals to answer a typical set of questions as requested by the University administration and management.

This exercise will expose you to all the problems associated with real data and is based on an actual expansion of the project when it had been running for a few weeks.

SIR UK USERS GROUP
AGM AGENDA
19th June 2009
1. Apologies for Absence
2. Minutes of the last Annual General Meeting
3. Matters Arising
4. Chair's report (Dave Doulton)
5. Treasurer's report (Jon Johnson)
6. Elections
7. A.O.B.

The committee currently consists of:

• Dave Doulton(Chair) , Adrian Hodgson, Jon Johnson(Treasurer), and Fran Williams who were elected at the 2008 AGM and are not due for re-elction (Bylaws article6(b))

• Mo Reardon who is the ex-officio member appointed by the SIR distibutor (Bylaws article 5(b)).

There are thus at least 5 vacant positions to fill by elections (Bylaws article 5(a))

Nominations for committee membership will be received by the current chair (Dave Doulton) up to 11am on 19th June 2009 (Bylaws article 6(e))