About

I help make BioPortal (http://bioportal.bioontology.org), which is an open-source application that allows users to browse, upload, download, search, and comment on ontologies. As a semantic web shop, we tend to eat our own dog food and much of our infrastructure relies on Protege and Lexgrid. In the future we'll be implementing a triplestore back-end for all of our ontologies, allowing for a SPARQL endpoint, federation, and access to our entire library as an RDF graph.

My work blends standards-based web development with a methodology for approaching and working with users that emerged from my experience working with communities as a cultural anthropologist. I have a breadth of experience, from graphic design to end-user support, and I combine my variety of interests to understand the daily needs of my software users and develop requirements, processes and tools that solve their problems, make sense to them, and are genuinely pleasing to use.