Bruce Nash- National Park Service
Dr. Steve Frysinger- Prime Investigator for Synthesis
Cally Oglesby- Director of the Synthesis Regional Support Center
Kieth Gittings- G.A. and Student Manager of Support Center
Andrew Welti- Support Staff, ISAT Intern
Janet Sobel- Support Staff, ISAT Intern
Melanie Wallace- Support Staff, ISAT Intern
Seth Roach (me) - Support Staff, CS Intern

About Synthesis Regional Support Center
We were open 9-4 M-F in the ISAT building room 3201.We were responsible for learning and supporting the Synthesis Program. Each inten had his/her own project to work on, but we all we able to answer questions for the support center. We supported Fort Sumpter, Shenandoah National Park, Blue Ridge National Park, and Petersburg National Battlefield. More parks will supported later.
The pace of work was not pressured due to the fact that what the staff was doing was being done for the first time, so nobody knew how long it was going to take. The challenge was find the most efficient way to get something done.

Our Work With Synthesis
The National Park Service is modernizing their methods of tracking information. Since most of individual park information is still on paper there is no real automated way to query information from them. Also the information that resides in one park is not readily accessible to other parks. This realization prompted the people from the National Park Service to start a project called Aquims. It was originally used for tracking air and water quality. This idea was expanded to include all types of information that could help national parks better manage resources and became Synthesis. Synthesis is a spatial relational database. It uses elements from GIS and is able to associate places on a map with information within a database. It also allows users to search documents for keywords stored in a keyword list. Documents associated with certain keywords will be found by the search. These keywords are generated by someone reading the document and compiling a list of keywords. This is what some of the other interns worked on. Synthesis support center can help parks digitize their information and create the necessary metadata to enter the information into the database. Andrew Welti worked on taking documents from specific parks and getting it into a conditioned digitized form. Janet Sobel and Melissa Wallace would take the digitized information and create keyword lists and then enter it into the Synthesis database. Since Synthesis is a work in progress, errors and problems often arose. Documentation of these errors and problems is important for future modification. The Management Information System will be the way to document these. Keith Gittings, the student manager and Graduate assistant was in charge of web site development and daily lab operation. I collaborated with Keith on several occasions on our projects.