Alan McMorran wrote:
> Hi
>
> Just thought I'd send a quick email to say thank you so much for creating
> Welkin, you've saved me untold amounts of mind numbing work trying to work
> out if my own software was doing what it was supposed to by letting me
> visualise the output data with welkin!
Alan, thanks much for your feedback! It's a pleasure to know that Welkin
is useful for somebody rather than ourselves ;-)
> In case you're interested, basically my work (PhD in power systems here in
> sunny ol' Scotland) is to deal with XML data for power systems. There's a
> nicely design standard called CIM (Common Information Model), which most
> utilities in the states are now using, as well as EDF in France, various
> Chinese companies, undoubtedly lots of other companies in other countries
> and some folk (including ourselves) are now looking at here in the UK. My
> project's to do with importation, modification, amalgamation and
> interrogation of this data then exportation again as RDF/XML data again (as
> well as into various other legacy formats).
Do you have an RDF dataset that we could use? We are very avid data
vampires :-)
> I wrote a few quick programs that simplify down the 10,000 off objects of a
> small power network model so it represented to just a hundred or so buses
> and branches and realised that using welkin I now had a nice way to
> visualise networks for which I have no line diagrams. This was also a nice
> example to show some folk about how storing data in this nice RDF/XML format
> was way better than proprietary comma seperated values or similar which they
> were doing before. I'm on a mission to make them realise that there's a
> better way than some archaic 1980s file format.
The new Welkin 1.1 that we are about to release contains filtering
capabilities that should help you out with that.
> The reason you've saved me so much work though is that the latest stage of
> the project is to amalgamate network models, so using welkin I was able to
> check the output of the application to check for stupid mistakes or
> incorrect network joins rather than having to manually go through tens of
> thousands of lines of XML code trying to work out whether the various
> branches had joined together correctly.
Yep, Welkin is a tool for metadata analysts, not really for end users,
so it makes perfect sense :-)
> Just thought I'd say thanks, and thought you might be interested in how the
> application's being used. I hope to get round to playing about with the code
> in the near future, see if I can back in some power network symbols on the
> diagram etc.
we were toying with the idea of using different icons per different data
type, but we went with the colors instead ;-)
> I'll try not to taint your work too much :-)
please check the trunk and not the release source code, since it changed
a lot.
--
Stefano Mazzocchi
Research Scientist Digital Libraries Research Group
Massachusetts Institute of Technology location: E25-131C
77 Massachusetts Ave telephone: +1 (617) 253-1096
Cambridge, MA 02139-4307 email: stefanom at mit . edu
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Received on Tue Apr 05 2005 - 00:21:40 EDT