Student Projects

Several graduate students in the School of Information and Library Science at UNC-CH have designed components of the OpenKey system as part of their studies:

Plant Record Creation Interface—David Knight
In partial fulfillment of the requirements for INLS 257 User Interface Design, David created a Web interface for the database that stores plant records. OpenKey staff use this interface to add, delete, and modify records.

Data Independence and XML Technologies—David Knight
This project, undertaken as an independent study, investigates techniques for making XML encoded data independent of XML applications by focusing on the transformation of relational data to an intermediate XML format.
XML provides a standard, robust format for marking up data so that it may be shared among many different data systems. Yet, often applications that promise to export or import XML documents do not deliver smooth integration with other "XML-capable" data systems. With these issues in mind, this project created a design-time system that 1) accepts user input, 2) transports data between XML and RDBMS (and vice versa), and 3) executes transportation while preserving data structure.

OpenKey Tree Identification Key Interface—Sarah Reuning
Another student in INLS 257, Sarah created a prototype of the public interface for the polyclave tree key. The interface needed to be easy to navigate for users with limited botanical knowledge. At the same time, the interface needed to proved copious amounts of information, such as term definitions and illustrations, which aid in identification. 

Given these specifications, the design process began with a review of relevant literature and guidelines, followed by periodic user feedback. An overview+detail menu, including an internal scroll bar for browsing tree characters, was determined to be the best design structure. Several sample interface screenshots were created. The following shows the proposed Tree Key main search interface:


Additional prototype documentation included a task analysis, user profile, state transition diagram, IRB request /usability study proposal and participant consent form.



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