Ontia - Software for Culture.

Myself and Matthew are doing our work experience with a company called Ontia. Ontia focus on cultural institutions such as museums, art galleries, antique dealers, private collectors,  research and scientific institutions. They provide various different types of software and web collections for the particular types of customers that may act as a catalog for certain institutions to keep track of collections, exhibition management and information on their artefacts and conservations. The different types of software they provide are Musnet, Naviagart, Collectio, Mediastore, Expono and Integra.

Since most of these applications are web based and in our first year of programming we don’t study any web development languages, there are a lot of new things we are learning. They use online databases which is also quite new to us and they are teaching us little steps to using these apps along the way.

On our first day here, we met with an employee name Wojciech who told us about the company and what services they provide. He gave us a brief description of what we will be learning here over the next 4 weeks and gave us an insight into how they complete their work, what software they use and got us all set up and ready to use it.

We got started with using the PHPmyadmin website which they used to create and maintain an online database for their company through another app called mySQL. Tomasz, who is another employee here showed us a few of their databases and the information it includes. We were giving a few tutorials on how to create a database and then we were given tasks to complete to build the database.
- Michelle.