My student project about Metadata-Management at the Zürcher Kantonalbank (ZKB) was a big success. The goals were to implement a prototype of an easy-to-use application for browsing, searching and navigating through meta data, defining processes how people have to updated and import meta data, defining a data model where meta data of every business area can inserted and to evaluate some more questions.
I invented a new type of visualization for meta data of an operational data store or Data-Warehouse.
Well, people were quite impressed being presented such a visualization, that abstracts from technical elements and elements from the business areas. With the developed browser you can see the relations between technical elements and elements from the business area. With this prototype it’s easy to make a complete impact analysis, making reports, see how elements are related to each other, and so on.
Unfortunately I can’t publish a screenshot of the prototype or go more deeper into details because the results of my student project is only for ZKB’s internal.
The duration of this student project was 12 weeks. In this time a met a lot of friendly and competent people at the ZKB. They all were nicely and friendly. I feel sadly to stop working there, but I have to finish my study and write my diploma thesis about an Implementation of a Graph Based Knowledge Browser for a CMS. With this implementation it is possible to measure the amount of knowledge transfer from one company to another e.g. in a outsourcing process.
In this student project I learned a lot of the factor humans. At the university you learn to solve problems and invent and innovate new solutions. But the focus is set to the solution. But in the real life, you have to make people understand your solution, sensibilize people for the problem and the need for a solution. It’s not a problem, it’s a challenge!
I wrote quite a lot source code and documentation. Just to imagine how much I wrote in 12 Weeks, I’ll list them all:
- over 14’000 lines of code
- 119 pages of program documentation
- 29 pages of user documentation
- 25 pages of data model descriptions (tables, attributes)
- 61 pages for the final paper
- 11 presentations in different business areas of the banc
I can recommend the ZKB to everyone making a studyproject there. It’s a good company with very nice people.