Marc-Antoine Parent

Research and Development role for Assembl, a collective intelligence tool. Assembl was developed in part in the context of the Catalyst project, by Bluenove and Imagination for People, with initial contributions from Caravan and the Institut du Nouvau Monde. Co-developed (with Benoit Grégoire) the ontology for interoperability within Catalyst. Contributed major aspects of information architecture, security, automated REST routes and a OWL-ORM bridge.

• Co-developed (with Benoit Grégoire) the most part of the data model and information architecture.
• Developed the interoperability infrastructure, as part of the Catalyst project, basing it on a OWL ontology, with links to other ontologies such as SIOC, OpenAnnotation and AIF.
• Developed a bridge between the ORM (SQLAlchemy), and the relationnal-semantic bridge of Virtuoso, so as to synchronize three data models (relational-OO-semantic: see article)
• Developed a generic RESTful layer based on traversal of ORM relationships.
• Developed a real-time client-server synchronisation protocol based on Websockets.
• Developed the security model and the authentication layer.
• Developed most of the engine for synchronisation with external data sources.
• General development of the application.
• Assistance to Catalyst partners for interoperability: Contributions to Wikitalia's Edgesense, help for Knowledge Media Institute (Open University)'s DebateHub, and for the collective intelligence metrics engine developed by Mark Klein from MIT.

Support and advise the community of education ICT practitioners and deciders to use standards, notably LOM, IMS-QTI 2.1, MLR, interactive whiteboards.

• Contributed to the evolution of the Eureka platform, a metadata catalogue for learning resources.
  • VCard handling (PHP)
  • Post-processing of LOM for error handling in harvested resources (XSL)
  • Requirement analysis for term equivalence between vocabularies
• Advised DECclic for use of standards for the evolution of their online course platform
  • Validated the applicability of IMS-QTI 2.1 as a target format for data from ExamStudio
  • Validated that the Moodle platform could support QTI tests, using the QTItools gateway
  • Recommanded use of heterogeneous technologies: widgets, distributed identity, collaboration, etc. to avoid single-platform lock-in
• Maintanance of the Normetic validator (Java, Schematron, XSD)
• Support on the design of the conceptual model of the MLR standard
• In charge of the Normetic section of the GTN-Québec site

Undisclosed project - Client/server tool, Java server, C++ client

• General development (Java server, C++ client)
• Design and implementation of extensions to the communication protocol
• Gained experience with both Google-specific and open-source tools and development methods.
  • Client-server protocols with Protocol buffers
  • Internal tools for distributed process management, interprocess communication
  • Test-driven programming with jUnit/GoogleTest
  • Code reviews with Mondrian and Perforce
  • Templates and STL
  • SQLite
  • SCons
• Contributed to internationalization infrastructure (Python)

Translateor - Automatic translation system for English and French (project) - OO model for semantic representation of text

• Developed a robust meta-data architecture using XML for storage of linguistic information in an object-oriented database
• Participated in the development of a OO model for abstract semantic representation of text (UML, Java)

Têtards - Labyrinth-type two-player video game - First video game designed in Québec, 6502 on Apple II+

• Programming (6502 on Apple II+)
• First video game designed in Québec