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.

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.

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.

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.

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”.

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.

Freedom Education Project Puget Sound (FEPPS) is a nonprofit organization that provides college classes leading to an Associate of Arts and Sciences degree at the Washington Corrections Center for Women in Gig Harbor, WA. Classes are taught by faculty from local colleges and universities with the same academic expectations they would have in a typical college setting. Students work hard to meet and exceed these expectations, but they have limited information resources available to support their studies. We have partnered with FEPPS to address this information gap by creating a small academic library for the students inside the prison. Over 1,000 donated books have been gathered, sorted by subject, and entered into a basic inventory catalog. We have established circulation policies and procedures, and have created collection development and maintenance guidelines. Students are already making good use of the library for class assignments and independent learning.

Edwin Monk, Sr. was a prolific naval architect in the Seattle area whose collection of over 6,000 ship plans, along with several artifacts, reference books, and photographs, was donated to the Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society (PSMHS). Since the donation, PSMHS has received numerous reference questions and requests for copies of the plans. Although the collection is housed onsite, access and retrieval of information has been challenging. The collection needs to be cataloged in the organization’s database and rehoused according to best archival practices. Our project goal was to provide PSMHS with a processing guide for future volunteers and interns, a project timeline and an estimated budget. PSMHS will use these documents to develop a grant proposal for obtaining funding and resources needed to process the entire collection. Rehousing and cataloging the collection will help assure long-term preservation and enhance the accessibility of the collection.

Go is a complex strategy game that requires consistent study in many different areas; by nature, it is difficult to practice and improve one’s skill level. Building an effective static practice routine can be difficult, due to the natural complexity of the game and the many different areas to study. Additionally, the online Go community is scattered and relatively sparse. Dango improves the experience and effectiveness of Go study by solving these problems. Students can track routines and visualize improvement, optimizing study plans and focusing them on areas that yield the best results for them at any given time. Dango also provides the tools that instructors need to teach students, in a single location--facilitating better student-teacher interaction and community bonding. By allowing players to improve both individually and together, Dango provides a valuable tool for all Go players to improve the quality of their Go experience.