I joined the Tetherless World Constellation in January 2010 as a Cognitive Science Ph.D. student under Deborah McGuinness.

Part of my research objectives include identifying, incorporating, and extending theories for visualization so that visual artifacts produced may be concretely evaluated for their efficacy in supporting a user to perform specific tasks. However, producing and evaluating a visualization is only half of the battle. Once produced, the system should successfully respond to the wealth of user clarification and elaboration inquiries regarding the visual artifact's content. This is especially difficult in a distributed environment such as the web. My current hypothesis is that semantic web technologies are well suited for distributed, heterogeneous data representation; formalizing visual strategies that should be applied during the visualization process; and representing the process documentation for the data incorporation and visual encoding decisions that led to a particular visual artifact.

I was very excited to submit a paper to the First Workshop on the Semantics of Visual Objects (http://semanticscience.org/workshop/semvo2010/), which ended up being canceled due to a low number of submissions. I recently finished working with Xian Li on a full paper accepted to the Third International Provenance and Annotation Workshop (IPAW 2010) (http://tw.rpi.edu/portal/IPAW2010). I have also been working with Gregory Todd Williams on the requirements, parameter ontology, and implementation of csv2rdf4lod, a tool to convert http://data.gov's CSV data to RDF following current linked data best practices. We submitted a description of our work to the 2010 I-SEMANTICS Triplification challenge. There is a video (@ 36:30) of my recent presentation, ''Seeing is Not Believing: Visual Strategies for Human Consumption and Elaboration of Information'', at our Cognitive Science colloquium (http://www.cogsci.rpi.edu/pl/issues-cognitive-science-video-archive?vid=118&egid=&pageid=509&siteid=26).