iSchool Capstone

Award Winner

2016

Time and Tide: The Wilhelm Hester Photography Collection

The Wilhelm Hester Photography Collection is a vital resource for both maritime and local historians, as well as a valuable asset to UW Special Collections. Unfortunately, as is frequently the case in large academic institutions, time constraints and financial pressures mean that the initial processing was basic, resulting in a poor-quality finding aid and inadequate document housing. Improper housing placed the photographs at risk from acidification and mechanical damage, whilst the inadequate finding aid dramatically reduced their accessibility. Our sponsor decided to completely restructure the collection and asked our team for help. We laid the foundation for this project by rehousing over 300 photographs and revamping the online description with enhanced metadata for a more intuitive user experience. Our work will transform the user’s first point of contact f into a gateway for collection discovery, enhancing its usability and maximizing our university’s contribution to research.

Video Game Metadata Schema (VGMS) Publishing

Video Game Metadata Schema (VGMS) Publishing Print cataloging has a long and standardized tradition to draw from, but with the emergence of interactive media, the same standards do not translate. The GAMER (Game Research) Group, led by University of Washington’s Jin Ha Lee, has been actively creating a schema called the Video Game Metadata Schema (VGMS) that captures concepts that are important to those who research video games. Our project will make this schema publicly available and understandable to all who would like to implement it. It will be especially useful for catalogers, metadata specialists, and information architects working with interactive media. In addition to publishing the VGMS, we are creating a publishing toolkit for future use as the schema is still an evolving project for the GAMER Group.

Wiki for Woodhaven

Woodhaven is a neighborhood with a rich history in the New York City borough of Queens. In 2008 the Woodhaven Cultural and Historical Society created a community wiki but within a year it fell into disuse. Due to recently increased interest in local history, including a library-driven "memory project" and a middle school history club, the organization was eager to make the wiki more accessible to the community. My project consisted of reorganizing the wiki with linking and tagging, publishing guidelines for editing and submitting articles, and using those guidelines to create new example articles. The recent uptick in interest demands an accessible tool where community members can share acquired knowledge of the area’s history and culture. Knowledge of local history enriches the experiences of both communities and individuals alike. This project will help facilitate increased community awareness and sharing of local history by providing an easy to use platform.

2015

Achilles

The $30 billion physical therapy (PT) industry is projected to grow 7% annually (HarrisWilliams&Co.). Despite this growth, current PT practices often leverage low-tech guidance, involve minimal patient-therapist communication, and do not provide a means for accountability. The PT industry is on the rise, and it’s time for PT technology to catch up. So, how do we help physical therapists serve their patients while guiding and motivating patients to get better faster? The answer is Achilles, a fully customizable physical therapy application that amplifies the patient-therapist relationship to provide guidance and motivation throughout the rehabilitation process. The therapist interface provides consistent insights into patients’ at-home progress as provided by the patient interface, effectively bridging the gap between office visits. Achilles augments the physical therapy experience and in turn, patients are able to better manage their injuries and get better faster.

Bontology

Colliers International, a commercial real estate company, currently faces problems with sharing information across their organization. Their organization houses many data silos which contain important client, deal, and referral information. Some of this data is accessible to employees but much of it is held privately within regional office databases and is difficult to share due to data formatting issues. Their information silos prevent them from capitalizing on opportunities that could be made simply by connecting the dots across databases. Bontology (business onotology) is a unique software that is comprised of three parts: a realtor’s dashboard, custom ontology, and conversion software. Bontology’s conversion software works with our custom ontology to connect disparate relational databases in a triple store. The dashboard allows Realtors to view sophisticated data analytics and houses a powerful internal search. Bontology now provides Realtors actionable items that will help drive profit and identify gaps in current business practices.

City of Seattle: Cataloguing Seattle’s Comprehensive Plan

A common problem facing many organizations today is the lack of a centralized knowledge library. One such organization is the City of Seattle’s Department of Planning and Development. Often, data is needed to support updates to Seattle’s 20-year growth plan. This data is usually found buried in Indicator Project reports, scaled data-gathering projects pertaining to civic topics such as Arts & Culture, Education, Housing and Land Use. These Indicator Project reports are stored in various locations throughout the department. Locating the correct data is often met with a high level of difficulty and frustration, due to lack of data availability, conflicting data and the inability to locate relevant data in a timely manner. Our project proposes to resolve these problems by building a centralized data library with an extensive taxonomy and metadata structure designed to enable fast, easy and accurate retrieval of important city demographic data.

Healthcare Cost Transparency

Healthcare costs in the U.S. have skyrocketed from $1.4 trillion in 2000 to $2.9 trillion in 2014 according to Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Our project – All-Payer Claims Database (APCD) Healthcare Cost Transparency, sponsored by the Washington Health Alliance (WHA) – may be a solution in healthcare cost containment and service improvement. APCDs collect de-identified medical claims data including clinical, financial, and utilization data. Several states have already passed a law to mandate an APCD, and Washington State is on the verge of passing the same law. WHA has the opportunity to be selected as the lead organization as the state authorized APCD administrator. Our project evaluates hosting options – in-house versus the cloud – and builds a functional but scaled-down APCD in Azure cloud to determine its feasibility. The result of this project will be to arm WHA with the knowledge to make informed decisions on the best APCD hosting option.

In-Vehicle Information System Design

Drivr is a rapidly expanding personal chauffeur service which commands a fleet of Tesla Model-S vehicles but previously lacked a consolidated system for logistical planning and execution. To solve this problem, I designed front-end interfaces for both drivers and dispatchers in addition to a back-end database by following the user-centered design process. For drivers, I utilized the Tesla’s 17-inch screen in the dashboard to design a low-cost solution which runs in the vehicles’ browser. For dispatchers, I designed a web interface which provides a number of much needed flexibility options. Testing has proven that this system will not only improve the capacity of Drivr to provide superior service, but because it is so much more efficient, effective, and satisfying to use, stakeholders, dispatchers, and drivers alike expect the new system to make Drivr an even better place to work.

KairosPDX Learning Academy: Managing Documentation for Emergent Curriculum and Social-Emotional Learning

KairosPDX Learning Academy (KLA) is a new Portland, Oregon charter school aimed at attacking the racial achievement gap. Curriculum is both designed – based on the Common Core Standards, and emergent – evolving from the interests and curiosity of students. KLA also specifically teaches foundational life skills including: focus and self-control, perspective taking, communicating, making connections, critical thinking, taking on challenges and self-directed engaged learning. Crucial to this process is documentation – capturing and recording activity and behavior of individual children in order to create curriculum for them and track their development. An enormous amount of information – images, text, audio, and video – is generated for and about each student. I modeled for KLA an implementable cloud-based method to organize, store, manage, and retrieve information as needed for curriculum development, reporting, reflection, and longitudinal assessment of student development, particularly as regards social-emotional learning and life skills.

MedPath

If you needed surgery today, do you know how much your insurance would cover and how much it would cost you? Chances are, it would take several phone calls, using a lot of confusing jargon, and up to three business days to get an answer. We want to change that. MedPath proposes to change that process by creating a mobile application that will allow for instant searching to verify insurance policy coverage. This project consists of two parts: a metadata framework, which is the foundation for designing a central database repository, and a wireframe design of the front end mobile application. It is a prototype of a fully functioning application that can change the way insurance coverage is currently understood and used in the US. It will allow consumers to verify their insurance policy coverage in real-time, therefore giving them the power to receive the quality care without paying unnecessary costs or wasting time.