Miami University IMS Senior Project

Project Description

The goal of UNIO was to apply our skills in web design and development to solve a real problem for the State Department. We first traveled to Washington DC to observe and interview some employees. We listened to stories about how they work and interact with each other. We heard a high level of frustration especially from younger employees. When they were researching a particular subject, it was really hard to connect with someone else who may have recently published or was currently working on a closely related topic. They would find out after they published that someone else was writing on their topic. This would cause duplication of effort, out of date information or just not the best work reaching the hands of important people.

Project accomplishments

1. Created an enjoyable and intuitive web experience for employees as they search for interdepartmental knowledge and connections.
2. Built a key-word search engine employees can use to bring up authors and content related to their current research project.
3. Built in ‘trending topics’ that are constantly updated based on the frequency of discovery in employee documents.
4. Created a familiar personalized contact section by using an approach similar to LinkedIn.

My individual contribution was all the coding and development behind the website. I created this working demonstration for our final design presentation to the State Department. The team designed a website and put together a prototype. I set up an Apache Solr database and submitted two hundred public documents to be indexed. Then we created a user database and populated it with actual state department employees. Finally, I built the system which takes a search term, sends it to the Solr database, finds the relevant people, sends them to the user database and then delivers all the important information to the original user.