— Dawson MacPhee, LINCS computer science co-op — When beginning my very first co-op job search, I had no idea what employers would expect from me. It was a daunting task looking through the job postings and deciding what I thought I’d be (somewhat) qualified for. After a few job interviews, I applied to join […]

— Amardeep Singh, LINCS computer science co-op — “Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer—that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design […]

— Justin Francis, LINCS Junior Programmer — A general Extract Transform Load process In data science there is a commonly used process called extract-transform-load (ETL). ETL involves three main steps:  1. Extract data from a source,  2. Transform the data via data cleansing and data manipulation, and  3. Load the transformed data to a data […]

— Sam Peacock, LINCS undergraduate research assistant — When I began working with ontologies at the LINCS project this summer, my colleagues and I quickly found ourselves asking exasperating questions like “How do you explain the visual concepts present in an artwork to a database?” Even more broad (and maybe ultimately unanswerable) questions like “what is […]

— Gracy Go, undergraduate research assistant — History has always been something I’ve been passionate about, and as an undergraduate student approaching graduation, I’ve become more eager to find ways to preserve primary sources. From my experience, having access to primary sources makes the researching process a lot easier, and these sources would not exist […]

— Sarah Mousseau, LINCS undergraduate research assistant — In the summer of 2020, I was hired as a research assistant with the University of Guelph’s Bachinski/Chu Print Study Collection. Initially, my job entailed the care and maintenance of the objects in the collection with a few other tasks as assigned. Of course, the arrival of the […]

— Devon Hayley Farrell, LINCS metadata co-op — If there’s one thing I have learned during my library, archival, and information graduate studies, it is that information institutions are adverse to change. The archival profession progresses at a glacial pace. This is juxtaposed with the leaps and bounds made in information technology over the past […]

— Kathleen McCulloch-Cop & Rashmeet Kaur, SCALE undergraduate research assistants — I (Kathleen) was introduced to user interface design at the start of my post-secondary education with Software Design 1, the first class on the first day of my first (ever) semester. I crowded into a lecture hall with 150 other people, each of us […]

— Thomas Smith, LINCS undergraduate research assistant — Over the many years I have worked on the LINCS project, I encountered many new terms. Sitting at my desk in THINC Lab, I used to hear people discussing something called ontologies. I would listen in to meetings about the creation of the CWRC ontology, and eventually I was […]

Image by Pieter Botha There are many graph databases out there that support RDF: Virtuoso, GraphDB, Stardog, AnzoGraph, and RDFox, to name just a few popular ones. But if the requirements for your triplestore include open source, as it does for our CFI-funded LINCS project, then Blazegraph and Apache’s Jena Fuseki are two of your […]