Nearly done with week 3 of my internship. I’ve gotten more familiar with the application, and I’m now able to work more independently, though I’m not yet doing every step in the process or using every aspect of the system. I think I’m more or less proficient with the entry-level stuff now, though. If you want to check out the end result of some of the work I’ve been doing, take a look at: http://matrix2.itasoftware.com/

Just do a search for flights between the US cities of your choice, then direct your attention to the Events calendar display at the bottom of the screen (you may need to scroll to see it). One of the main things I’ve been working on is using a special back-end application to harvest events data off of various websites to populate this events calendar display. We’re still identifying sites to harvest data from and building up data in the database, so some cities have much better coverage than others at the moment, but you can get the general idea. Given that ITA is headquartered in Cambridge, MA, Boston has better coverage than many cities right now, so that’s one of the best cities to search. Currently, the data gets refreshed about once per week, usually on Friday evening or Monday morning.  Give it a try, especially if you’re planning a trip somewhere and want to check out airfares and activities at the same time. If you have suggestions, feel free to submit them via one of the links on the site. Comments are directed to my team, and I assure you that they will be considered carefully.

As I was warned, the web page tagging and harvested data review process is kind of tedious, but no more so than a lot of the work I do with data in the library catalog or spreadsheets, and the back-end application provides support that is far more sophisticated and vastly superior to that offered by any library system I’ve ever seen. There are significant bugs and usability issues right now, since the application is still in the alpha development stage, but I’m enjoying working with it, and I feel like I will be able to make some meaningful contributions toward its development, which is pretty satisfying.

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