What I have been doing over the summer.

So after a busy and anxious Spring semester, I landed a couple of projects that I found interesting and very varied in scope. During the month of June, I worked on a research paper with Dr. Anke Schwittay of the Rios Institute (www.riosinstitute.org). We analyzed the corporate culture of Dow Chemical (specifically their Information Services Division) and made some recommendations on how they can improve productivity, morale, and performance. This culminated in a paper that was submitted to Dow on July 6th. Concurrently, I accepted a position with the XMDR Project (www.xmdr.org). This is a joint effort between the UC Berkeley Water Resources Department, Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, the Department of Energy, Department of Defense, EPA, the National Cancer Institute, and a number of other environmental agencies. The XMDR project is an attempt to develop an ontology in the form of an ISO 11179 standard that these agencies will be able to use to interact with each other and exchange terminology and documents among one another. I am working on a prototype terminology search engine that will enable researchers and users to search terms and display intelligent results from these multiple data sources and terminologies. I have also been offered a freelance web design project by the Rios Institute to develop a site for a network of ICTD organizations in the Bay Area. This is tentatively going to be called the iGuide and I will be using a MySQL backed site and use Drupal to develop the site. Overall, the summer has been fairly busy, but I am learning lots of new technologies that I would have not thought I would use. Currently, I am learning Skos (Simple Knowledge Organization System) for the XMDR project to produce RDF graphs from raw datasets. I have had to learn Ant and Subversion scripts, and become very familiar with the command line interface. This is an important part of my growth here at the iSchool. I will be continuing as a Graduate Student Researcher with the XMDR project in the Fall.