The Interventional Radiology department at Seattle Children's Hospital currently deals with an inefficient, error prone system to manually transcribe patient appointments from the billing system to a calendar accessible to nurses, Radiology technologists, and doctors in the operating room. We set out to determine how we can improve the scheduling process for interventional radiology procedures at Seattle Children’s Hospital so that staff are able to easily view upcoming procedures within the context of the patient’s protected health information. We designed a scheduling system to fit the needs of clinicians and staff at Seattle Children's Hospital. The application, called Hippo, is built to contain information accessible with a glance, while maintaining customizability to adapt to the hospital's changing needs. Hippo also connects with existing medical applications, such as Epic and Cerner, to automatically import new appointments and reduce transcription errors. Hippo is a browser based application designed to be accessible on desktop, mobile, and large screen devices.

The future of the country lies in the hands of the children. If the child doesn’t get the right start, he is 60% more likely to never go to college and 70% more likely to be arrested for a violent crime. However, good quality of early learning education can change these statistics. The Childcare Quality & Early Learning Center for Research and Professional Development (CQEL) is the University of Washington’s effort to measure and improve the quality of early learning environments for children. CQEL is responsible for conducting, onsite evaluations of child care providers located throughout the state. The process of rating early education sites was being executed using a complex and cumbersome Excel spreadsheet until Data Wanderers pitched in. The team transformed the IRC Database solution from Excel to a robust SQL relational database thereby catering the problem of data security, data losses, multi-user access and facilitates standard and adhoc reports to analyze the performance of various sites.

The Museum of Flight receives a huge amount of research requests from its patrons/customers. The requests are collected through paper forms, stored in editable PDF’s and processed in Excel for reference and tracking purposes. Due to inefficient processing and primitive technology, the resource usage is high and redundant. They strive for a robust information management system which is intuitive to use, can be accessed from multiple locations and stores data centrally. The Data Flight capstone team assessed the requirements and designed a database management system for the museum of flight. The new system is built on cutting edge technology, incorporating important features like central storage, multiple session access to update data in real time, and multivariable reporting. As a prospective patron/customer of the museum, your requests will be processed much faster. The solutions takes paper forms out of the equation and contributes towards a clean and greener environment.

In 2010, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) was required to send records from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) to the newly formed American Indian Records Repository (AIRR). This event was based on a judiciary order in the 1996 case Cobell v. Norton (now Cobell v. Salazar) which successfully argued that the United States Federal Government was lax in its handling and storage of these records and the issues related therein. Until now, NARA has been unaware as to the extent of AIRR’s holdings and has not had a way to assist information seekers in locating their needed documents. Through data sorting and analysis, I created a finding aid which now makes it possible for NARA to assist those seeking their educational, personal, and financial records.

Each year, Mount Rainier National Park receives over 2,600 requests to camp in the wilderness. Hikers can’t view which campsites are currently available, so they send multiple itineraries for the same trip. These requests must be submitted by fax, requiring over 400 hours of manual data entry by park employees over the summer. Hikers often have to wait up to one month for a response, creating anxiety and uncertainty about whether their request will be approved. To solve these problems, we created an online reservation system where hikers can view available campsites and submit their itinerary online. Every request must be reviewed by a park employee, so we created an employee portal to help streamline their process and improve response time. Our entirely new reservation system will ensure that hikers can enjoy the beautiful wilderness for years to come.

Seattle JazzED, a music education non-profit, has two substantial and growing collections: sheet music used by instructors and instruments lent to students. Because neither collection was inventoried, it was difficult for JazzED staff to track where instruments were or what song arrangements had already been purchased. We created a database for, and cataloged, JazzED’s non-bibliographic resources using custom metadata built around their needs. We constructed the database on a cloud-based platform, allowing staff and instructors to easily share and edit entries, check out instruments, make notes about repairs, and search for songs by skill level, style, and more. This project provides JazzED with a personalized system that saves their staff precious time and energy, which in turn supports their mission to empower students of all backgrounds. By dramatically expanding JazzED’s ability to manage their resources, we have contributed to their powerful impact on students and music education in our community.

Sharks are enormously important to our ecosystem, yet poorly understood. Researchers seek to understand and study them but are hampered by siloing, wasted research opportunities, and underdeveloped collaborative networks. Shark Share Global is a website and database that facilitates sample sharing and collaboration between researchers around the world. It is custom-built to encompass the needs of researchers- bringing the technology solution as close to their existing processes of sample cataloguing as possible- to ensure a low barrier to adoption. Open only to accredited shark and ray researchers, it is a simple, elegant solution to a sprawling problem, introducing a formal research collaborative tool where none have existed before.

Once one of our team members, Jason, travelled to the west coast of the US and stayed in a small and cozy hotel. He was surprised to see the front desk making notes with her pen and paper and her pc monitor being surrounded by sticky notes. Apparently those notes weren’t helping much as she was still busy browsing through pages and sticky notes for a piece of information. Jason couldn’t help but wondering: is there a information management tool that he can build, without too much investment, to help those small hotels to do their business in a snap? This is what our project aims to tackle: to usher small hotels, who are still managing their information manually, to a technology based information system built with an open source relational database and an intuitive user interface. Our goal is simple. We want to offer hoteliers a solution to run their core business functions more efficiently, and to make their life much easier.

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.