Last summer, I worked a lot on building the Semantic Annotator for DataONE, and this summer, I was granted the opportunity to continue to improve upon it. I made some small changes over the course of the last year, mostly fixing bugs that came up, but now I have nine more weeks to devote more fully to work on it.
This year, I am working alongside Yue Robin Liu, one of my labmates – he is focusing on ontology management, while I will be focusing on user and session management. This week was some prep work, determining what a basic schedule should look like for work over the summer.
I got some information from Ben Leinfelder and Matt Jones about the user management system already in place at DataONE, and I have been reviewing that documentation so that we can look at linking in the Annotator to that system as well. I also started looking at some JavaScript libraries for state and session persistence of the Annotator webapp – right now, if a user refreshes the page while in the middle of annotating a dataset, the page reloads back to the start state, blowing away all the user’s work. I am hoping that will be a relatively easy thing to fix, so I plan to tackle that over the weekend if I can.