The Google Summer of Code program is a way for Google to contribute to the open source community by funneling student man hours during (the so-called American) summer break. It grants to students 5000 USD (wow) of stipend upon completion of the program in exchange of doing an open source project (and motivating you to stay contributing after GSoC ends of course!). Needless to say, I am accepted as one of the students for GSoC :)

I will be working on creating a round-trip converter for http://wikipathways.org and http://reactome.org so both websites can share pathway data to and from each other. It sounds simple (well it usually is in computing) but in practice the two websites use quite radically different XML formats. Nevertheless I am really glad to be able to work on a programming project that is also related to my major. Intersection of interests to the fullest.

So for my personal documentation and also for your interest, I am attaching the proposal here. The first proposal is the one that I eventually will implement, although from my correspondence among the mentoring organizations it appears that the other proposal was also accepted (but students obviously cannot work on two projects at once, so yeah). The .rst files are the source code in reStructuredText format. 

If everything goes well I will most likely post weekly reports of the project on this blog. The non-chronological progress will also be posted on this GenMAPP wiki page.

I'm looking forward to a GREAT and very exciting 3-months break!