The subject of my MSc was the migration of a relational database to
an object-oriented one (schema and data). Jessie
(my supervisor) was then keen on working in the same area, possibly on
the same problem. So we had some meetings with the people I had worked
with for my MSc (some taxonomists from the Royal
Botanic Garden of Edinburgh). These discussions highlighted some problems
they have with their current database management system. Their problems
raised some conceptual mismatch between common DBMS and the way they work.
It seemed an interesting problem to tackle for my PhD.
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The abstract of my PhD is available here, and a list of publications and posters can be found here. The official home page of the project can be found here. The main focus of my research is the use of databases to support taxonomic working practices. Many approaches are being considered and tested. |
The first year of research has been very enjoyable. I liked doing my literature review because of the huge opportunity to learn (too much). That was one of the main reasons why I decided to do a PhD.
The second year has been more "real" work with writing papers and implementing a few prototypes. The latest version of the latest approach to the problem (!) is available on the web. The database contains its own generic HTTP server that was designed to be coupled with any object-oriented database and thereby offer an automatic generation of HTML interfaces to the database. Of course, it is also a standard web server, which allows customization of the display. Be warned that the server runs on my work computer, therefore might not be constantly available or might be overloaded at times (Java compilations are one of those things that put a PII 400 to its knees).
Now, let me tell you about the writing-up thing, the most difficult,
tiring, horrible part of the PhD. I have now nearly finished draft 1, and
I have to say that this is the part I enjoyed the least. The days spent
writing pages that will probably be discarded, the time spent to go back
to papers that haven't been read for such a long time that they have dust
on them (and there are hundreds of them), the difficulty to read a document
that has gone close to 300 pages, are not moments I'll cherish all my life.
But that's what doing a PhD is about, isn't it?
| Last modification: 05/06/01 |
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