Internship Project in Austria

// designing taxonomies and ontologies & UIUX

Why in Vienna?

I travelled to Vienna, Austria in the summer of 2023, to work for Semantic Web Company, who are headquartered there. As a leader market leader for semantic solutions, their software PoolParty leverages machine learning, NLP and graph technologies to create deep and comprehensive models within a domain. Taxonomies, ontologies, and knowledge graphs are great for holding this kind of information as they help provide semantic meaning behind words and phrases, in a simple yet effective manner. I worked with one of their clients, who specializes in the agricultural research field and had the privilege of helping them:

Redesigning Thesaurus Website

Revamping Taxonomy & Ontology

Resarch SPARQL Queries for Search Results

Provide Feedback & Recommendations

How I Got Here

As part of a study abroad with the iSchool (Information School) at UW, I has selected to go on a study abroad with several other students to work with Semantic Web Company (SWC). From four of SWC's clients, I chose to work with an international non-profit organization that provides agricultural information to people around the world, whether that's easily applcable knowledge, reserach knowledge, or anything in between. I worked with two other students from UW and over the course of this trip, we redesigned the client's UIUX and helped them review and provide future suggestions for their PoolParty architecture.

Timeline

① Deciding Stakeholder Needs

Initially, we believed that our stakeholders were the smallerholder farmers who didn't have access to information like the big companies and researchers. But after talking with out client, we learned that our project focused on providing a better experience to the agricultural researchers.

② Reimagined Thesaurus

The first step was to redesign the thesaurus website. The current website was old and nearly non-functional. My teammates didn't have much experience with design so I led this part, teaching them and completely overhauling the design in the process.

③ Reviewing Knowledge Model (Taxonomy/Ontology)

The next step of creating a better user experience was reviewing the knowledge models and queries sent to the model. This included taxonomies, ontologies, and knowledge graphs. And the queries came from a search bar in the website to look up research documents.

④ The Final Push

After completing these two project, we created a PowerPoint presentation to show our results to our client, but also other SWC clients. We nearly pushed this part back too far, as on the last week, I was working 10+ hours a day, to finish everything.

Showing the Clients

With representatives from some of the largest companies in the world, including multiple Fortune 500, we showed off our approach to solving the problems presented to us regarding user experience. We demoed our new interactive website and explained the new functions added. We also explained potential improvements to the knowledge model including disambiguation work-arounds, autocomplete optimization, database indexing or hashing, expanding ontological relationships, and search with camera or microphone. Afterwards, we celebrated our hard work by getting dinner with SWC at an Austrian "biergarten" 🇦🇹!

SKILLS & TOOLS USED: PoolParty (Knowledge Models), Figma, SPARQL

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