My name is Xiaoliang Jiang, a second-year graduate student in Library and Information Science from University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. I am the DataONE summer intern for the project 1: Markdown-based Semantic Annotation of Workflow Scripts, which focuses on an extension to the RStudio environment enabling data analysts to directly publish RDF that richly describes the semantics of their scripts.
My first week internship for the project started with a face-to-face meeting at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with my mentors: Prof. Deborah McGuinness and John Erickson. I spent two days on this fantastic meeting with my mentors and discussed a lot of things with them. We worked out a 9-week schedule for my internship and review some basic but very important concepts about semantic web. This meeting further confirms the primary goal for this project, and let me know the profound meaning of it which not only may help users to ensure their workflows and results are easier to understand, but also increasing the potential likelihood they will be cited, reused and reproduced by others.
For my first week, my goal was to review some basic theory about semantic web principles and the working environment of Rstudio. I read some relevant slides about semantic workflow, semantic markdown, and learnt the relations and differences among ProvONE, XHTML+RDFa and YesWorkflow. I also installed a R package called โstrcodeโ in my Rstudio which could organize and abstract R codes better and inspired me a lot. I also review the functions about Rnotebook and Rmarkdown by some relevant slides provided by my mentors.
After reviewing these relevant materials, I am learning on the โstrcodeโ and trying to figure out how to create a R package which may be a possible way to achieve our goals in this project.