New Surroundings

I would really like to post more often, but frankly, I've been too busy. The New Year brought a change of job scenery and I've been really busy getting up to speed and learning a ton of new things.

That's not to say I haven't been writing at all. As I come up to speed here, I'm taking the opportunity to capture what I learn in a development wiki. My new team has a wiki instance in place, but it's been lightly used to this point. I'm a huge fan of using wikis for development. I like to leverage the wiki as a focal point to capture technical ideas and documentation for the team. Most people seem eager to contribute, so I hope it takes off.
One point here, we're using the wiki included with SharePoint. It's not nearly as hard to edit as MediaWiki (the Wikipedia wiki engine), but I still prefer MoinMoin (used by many Apache projects).

The heart of the software being built here relies on Ontology, and leveraging the data stored in that ontology. Ontology has always been a kind of slippery concept for me to grasp and while I've worked at another place which also did some ontology-related work, this seems "different"somehow. I'm sure it has to do with my limited understanding of this concept. I won't be involved directly in defining any ontologies (nor was I before). Like before, my job will be to create tools to help users sift through the ontology and find meaningful data and relationships so that they can, in turn, make better decisions more efficiently.

The tool used here to create the ontology is Top Braid Composer. We're accessing the data using Sparql, which is sort of like SQL for ontologies. And we can connect to the ontology model directly through Java using the Jena library. At this point, I'm just starting to learn to use these tools.

The UI is being developed in Flex. I've been wanting to do some Flex development for quite some time and am eager to start contributing. The team has chosen the Cairngorm micro architecture to help enforce best practices in the Flex framework.

Other than that, version control is Subversion and we're now starting to use Maven for automated builds.

All in all, it seems like a solid environment to get things done.

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