(1) FASCONN: The Team

Hello and welcome to the development blog of the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) Application Partner Project AP20: Founders and Survivors Genealogical Connections project, known as FASCONN. This first post introduces our technical team members.

Len Smith (Project Manager)

TO BE ADDED (bio collection with Nick Knight)

Sandra Silcot (Analyst/Programmer and Tech Lead)

Sandra has a Bachelor of Applied Science (EDP) and a Bachelor of Arts (History & Social Theory) and has worked mainly developing applications software since the late 1970's. Her career started with the State Electricity Commission of Victoria as a trainee Analyst/Programmer and later as a database analyst using IBM's IMS. After a four year stint as a trade union official working mainly on technological change and women's issues for the Municipal Officers Association, she completed her Arts Honors degree at the University of Melbourne in the early 1990's. Since that time she has worked in a variety of IT roles in the higher education sector, all of which have been related to world wide web technologies and SGML/XML encoding systems. After a ten year stint developing and supporting the University of Melbourne's web based teaching and learning system Sandra has been involved with research work in the digital humanities field, in particular being the lead developer in the Founders and Survivors project. Sandra is comfortable in a wide range of activities from feasibility assessment through to deployment and support. She uses a variety of tools and technologies such as web servers (Apache), relational databases, XML/SGML, XML databases, XQuery, XSLT, Perl, Javascript, directory services (LDAP), general Linux systems administration and virtualisation (VSphere and OpenStack) and is a skilled systems integrator. She most enjoys working directly with academic end users to apply IT in solving problems which are important to them.

Matt Coller (Spatial Visualisation consultant and developer)

Matthew Coller is a specialist in multimedia authoring and dynamic visualisation.  Working at the University of Melbourne from 1998 to 2001 he co-authored the interactive ChemCAL modules that still accompany chemistry teaching at a number of universities, and which have recently been adapted for inclusion in the VCE textbooks, Heinemann Chemistry 1 & 2. After completing a Master of Multimedia degree at Monash University in 2004, Matthew embarked on a PhD investigating historical visualisation. His initial prototype,SahulTime, demonstrates ways of visualising Australia's past across a variety of timescales: historical, archaeological and geological, and has won awards at two major archaeological conferences.  Matthew is now expanding this vision to build Temporal Earth, an online system that draws on crowd-sourced data to present an interactive visualisation of world history across all timescales. Within this ANDS project, Matthew will develop the functionality to present Yggdrasil's search-results as maps, timelines, or spatio-temporal representations of processes over time, which can then be combined with other content visualisations from the Temporal Earth project.

John Bass (Data linkage consultant and developer)

TO BE ADDED (bio collection with Nick Knight)

James Rose (Genealogy database consultant)

TO BE ADDED (bio collection with Nick Knight)

Nick Knight (User interface and domain expert)

TO BE ADDED (bio collection with Nick Knight)

Others (to be determined)

We will engage other programmers to do short self-contained units of work to assist the core team focus on the more difficult high-risk elements of the project.