University, school, people, data

After a bit of reading around, in order to carry out any research and analysis, I need a set of data that I can work on. In this particular case, it would be the university staff's names, roles and interests.

So today, I carried out a survey on the university structure, school and staff, found out where are those informations located, and start thinking the ways to extract those information automaticly.

Southampton university splits into three faculties -- Enginnering Science and Mathematics; Law, Arts and Social Science.; Medicine Health and Life Science, each have a few schools in there. Each school have their own web site, in which they tend to publish all the staff and what they do. Since these web page are developped independently, the layout and the information contained varies greatly. At this point, I have to say, the semantic web technology -- the linked and annotated data is so useful, I immediately know how to extract those from our ECS site, which is fully annotated.

I think, from what I explored today, except the ECS site, the fastest way to extract those people data from each web site is by type them out, how sad is this. But I'll keep an open mind in how to obtain these data.