Weekly Journal

Week 5

June 20, 2014

I made it to the top of Piestawa Peak last weekend! As you can see, I wore H&M for a close to 2000 foot climb so I got more than a few looks, haha. I've been here 5 weeks now, but the scenery doesn't cease to amaze me - I only wish I had started hiking here earlier! Thanks to David, a coworker in the lab for recommending the hike. I'll hopefully hit up Papago Park and take a nice long stroll through the Desert Botanical Garden before I leave for Boston this weekend.

In other touristy news I saw a great band, Black James Franco, at the The Trunk Space on Monday. I believe I read someone describe them as "post-jazz jam rock" - I have little to no idea what that means but they put out some really great vibes and I hope you give them a listen:

Research this week has revolved around writing methods to convert JSON, pulled from Coursera, to RDF. The ontology was produced in Protege earlier this week so in the same file I was able to create some sample data to use that as a reference for the conversion methods. The formatting was a little different than the framework I wanted to use (Apache Jena) so there were some discrepancies there between OWL2 and RDF/XML. Eventually, using an RDF validator I discovered the data formats were equivalent functionally so I could use Jena to assign properties.

Currently we're storing our RDF in a flat-file so we'll be exploring Fuseki/TDB and some other triplestore solutions in the coming week to make our data more persistent and reliable. The summer's going by pretty quickly but I'm confident we can have a prototype out by the end of the 10 weeks!

-Sebastian