Skype is a wonderful tool. I used to use it to keep in touch with a buddy who was stationed in Japan, and it was amazing. On Thursday I used it to meet with my advisor to discuss refinements to my research. It worked out very well, as my schedule was being whipsawed by a proposal I’m working on at the office. And sitting at my kitchen table certainly beat having to drive home from Fairfax during rush hour.

An even better part of the meeting is that my advisor seemed pleased with my ideas on moving forward. We refined them a little, and now I have to get them arranged into a logical story that we can present to my committee. I have to get it done this weekend to we can meet again next week.

Thankfully, the proposal is almost over, so I might get a chance to finish up this research refinement in the coming week.

Per the instructions from my committee at my proposal defense, I have been working to narrow and focus my topic. While I initially expected that to be relatively easy, I haven’t made a whole lot of progress to date. Working 12+ hour days on a proposal at work hasn’t made it any easier.

I met with my advisor just over a week ago, and it seems my exercise in narrowing has morphed into something of an expansion. Clearly, the least-researched area within my proposed topic is the generation and assignment of semantic metadata to services interfaces such as WSDLs. Almost all the work on semantic description has assumed manual metadata generation.

On the direction of my advisor, I am taking this small area (generating and assigning semantic metadata to WSDLs with sufficient detail to compose web services into executable processes) and generalizing it to address any type of service. By “any type of service” I mean quite literallyany type of service: web services, doctors’ services, shipping services, anything at all.

So I’ve been working on capturing 10 or so questions that cover that area. I’ve almost got enough to send to my advisor. Hopefully I’ll be done and have a draft to him tomorrow.