Audubon Data Project Final Report

The Audubon Data Project was initiated as a Clark University Capstone project. The project’s client, Mass Audubon’s Shaping the Future of Your Community program, had identified a need to improve their data management methods and make better use of their data. The Capstone team, composed of Clark University graduate students, met with the client regularly to review the current state of the data and potential improvements to be made. The process began with a data review. During the review we worked with the client to explicitly define the purposes and requirements of the data, the current process for updating and using the data, and the ways that different types of records were related to one another. After the review, we were able to identify the issues in the current system which we would seek to resolve. These included data integrity issues such as ensuring crucial items (such as a town name) were always included when entering data, and data structure issues such as having a relatively user-friendly way to express relationships and update records that were part of a relationship