iSchool Capstone

2015

Project Logo

Building a Legacy: Digitization and Outreach at the NBBJ Archives

As an architecture firm, NBBJ has had Swedish Hospital Medical Center as a long term client since 1936. This has resulted in almost 80 years of architectural records, which have design, legal, technical, intellectual, cultural, and historic value for both the architectural firm and the hospital. NBBJ recently moved their architectural records to a secure off-site location which has opened up space but increases the waiting period for architects who need to access the drawings for current projects. For this project we selected, digitized, and publicized within the firm a selection of architectural drawings related to projects with Swedish Hospital Medical Center. We then created a video to promote the digitized records and documentation for future digitization projects. This project strengthens the working relationship between the hospital and the architecture firm and ensures that the drawings will continue to serve as a means for inspiration for many years to come.
Project Logo

CherryTime

Everyone has something they can donate to charity, but many do not have the time. Existing applications that aim to make charity convenient have focused on monetary donations while neglecting physical donations. Non-profit organizations need physical items that many individuals own, but do not use. CherryTime is a web application that seeks to enable anyone with limited time to donate physical items. With CherryTime, donations take minutes. Users can find nearby donation sites, give to charity, and continue their day. The list of sites is community-provided and community-maintained. Non-profit organizations can specify exactly what they need and monitor the health of their donation sites. CherryTime gives users a lens into the needs of their community and gives them the power to make a difference.
Project Logo

Cisco Dash

The proliferation of Internet connected devices in the home has brought with it a disparate array of user interfaces. Use of multiple devices often means changing from one interface to another, yielding a disjointed experience. Further, a massive amount of information is collected and stored in these devices. Cisco Dash is a web application that serves as a single location to view and use Internet of Everything devices. It also provides an enterprise-grade analytics platform to give users the capability of making smart living decisions at home.
Project Logo

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.
Project Logo

ConnectMe

With ConnectMe, gamers no longer have to find random strangers online to play with. Instead, they can find local gamers that have similar gaming interests and abilities. They can then meet up on, or off-line, have fun playing games, and even make new friends. Many people play multiplayer games online nowadays, whether it’s with their friends, family or even random strangers. However, many of these users would like to meet new gamers that have similar gaming interests. ConnectMe enables users to connect with other individuals with similar interests by allowing users to create a customized profile, send private messages, and add friends--all essential to building a community. What differentiates us from any other matchmaking system is that we have a localized find feature that allows gamers to find others around them who they can then meet and play with.
Project Logo

Controlled KAOS: Workflow for a Metadata Observatory

The universe of metadata standards is expansive, diverse, and continuously evolving. My project supported the creation of KAOS (Knowledge-Advancing Organization Systems), an online repository for metadata schemes and schemas of all forms, functions, and levels of complexity - including controlled vocabularies, thesauri, web ontologies, subject lists, classification schemes, indexing languages, descriptive frameworks, conceptual models, and more. After exploratory research into data ingest, storage, migration, transformation, analysis, and visualization, I designed, tested, and implemented a proof-of-concept infrastructure and workflow that lays the foundation for development to begin on a larger scale. When fully launched, the KAOS platform will use linked data to visually represent relationships among metadata standards and show changes in those standards over time. As a centralized access point to the wide world of metadata vocabularies, KAOS serves as a valuable resource for information professionals in any domain or industry.
Project Logo

Coordinate

Nowadays, nobody’s schedule is the same and a significant amount of time is wasted trying to find common openings for group meetings. While there have been other services created to try and address this problem, they have major issues including poor user interface and a lengthy data entry process. Coordinate was created by our team to solve this problem and address the critical flaws in the existing tools. Coordinate is an online scheduling platform that allows users to quickly organize schedules together to find meeting times for the entire group. After receiving a link from the host, all a user needs to do is use our click-and-drag entry calendar to indicate their availability and our system will identify the optimal time for the group to meet. By simplifying event scheduling, we hope to allow the groups to have more time to improve their event, rather than wasting it comparing schedules.
Project Logo

Corelytics: Data Analysis of Small IT Businesses

Corelytics provides more than 135 small IT service businesses’ with a financial management tool that helps these businesses maintain an automated account keeping system. The tool, through data analysis algorithms, analyzes and flags transactions that misalign with businesses’ financial goals. Executives use the tool’s dashboard to cut data noise and determine “WHAT” aspects of financial data needs attention for improving revenue to expense ratio. However, these smaller businesses lack resources to analyze and determine how to improve key financial pivots. Wouldn’t it be great if businesses could see financial data trends of healthy companies within their industry? Our project aims on delivering this exact solution by analyzing all hosted financial data in a specific industry. We want to provide financially weaker businesses with healthy trends in their industry via the tool’s dashboard. This will help them determine the “HOW” of improving revenue to expense ratio so that Corelytics can stay true to its commitment of enabling “BETTER BUSINESS DECISIONS”.
Project Logo

Coursector: A UW course discovery and comparison tool

Finding the right courses every quarter is a challenge for undergraduate Huskies. To evaluate prospective courses, students depend on information resources that are often incomplete or unreliable. Coursector is an application that helps undergraduates find, compare, and select classes that best fit their academic goals and interests. Drawing from over 200,000 unique records of UW transcript data, our application provides students with personalized recommendations, to quickly narrow their course search, and clear visualization of how courses compare by workload, teaching quality, average student grades, and class demographics. Coursector makes it easy to compare course offerings side-by-side, including the same course taught by multiple professors. With Coursector, finding the perfect course is easier than ever.
Project Logo

Creating a Parish Library

St. Luke Parish is a Catholic church and school located in Shoreline, Washington. This project focused on organizing the St. Luke Parish library to increase accessibility for parishioners. The parish owned a large number of books, which are now labeled and arranged on the shelves by subject for ease of use and access. I evaluated the checking in/out system and established a system for getting books from the donation stage into the collection, if appropriate. The creation of this library will be a benefit to the parish by providing increased access to helpful books, especially related to issues dealing with the church. The vision is that parishioners will utilize this library often.