2011 Project 3

It Came Out of the Sky

Project due at 9 pm 10/31/11 Chicago time

Project 3 will be the second group project and the focus here will be on geographic data and on integrating data from multiple sources with various levels of rigor in their data.

As with Project 2 you should very quickly set up a web page for your group project and send the URL to andy. Each Friday of the project each team member should post on the project web site an overview of what he/she did on the project that week.




In this project we are going to take a look at data on unidentified flying objects from the National UFO Reporting Center at www.nuforc.org/webreports/ndxloc.html

We will take the reported UFO sightings in the contiguous US from Jan 2001 through December 2010, which will be about 35 MB of data, and correlate them with airport locations available at www.partow.net/miscellaneous/airportdatabase/ and population density available at factfinder2.census.gov. You may also want to look at http://download.geonames.org/


For a C you need ...


For a B you need to add ...


For an A you need to add ...


As usual you should start by taking a look at the various data sources and see the kind of variability you have there and what the major issues will be in integrating those various data sources.

As with project 2, each Friday each member of the team should post a description of what they did on the project to the project web site. There are more opportunities in this project for different team members to focus on different areas.

There is code that integrates modest maps with processing here: www.tom-carden.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/modest_maps_interactive.zip



As with Projects 1 and 2 you should create a set of web pages describing your work on the application which has a max size of 1024 x 768 as before. This time instead of embedding the processing application you should have a link so people can download your application (and the necessary data files) to run your application. Please make sure that your application is Mac / Windows / Linux compatible. If you can get your app to run online through a browser then do include that version as well. The web pages should also describe the contribution of each team member (ie who worked on which interface elements, who worked on converting the data into a more usable form, etc.)

Please send me a 1024 x 768 jpg image of your visualization for the web. This should be named p3.<someone_in_your_groups_last_name>.jpg.

When the project is done, each person in the group should also send me a private email ranking your coworkers on the project on a scale from 1 (low) to 5 (high) in terms of how good a coworker they were on the project. If you never want to work with them again, give them a 1. If this person would be a first choice for a partner on a future project then give them a 5. If they did what was expected but nothing particularly good or bad then give them a 3. By default your score should be 3 unless you have a particular reason to increase or decrease the number. Please confine your responses to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and no 1/3ds or .5s please. I will average out all these scores for projects 2 through 4 and keep them in mind when assigning final grades to projects 2 through 4.

Each group will present their work to the class and describe its features to the rest of the class. All team members are expected to participate equally in that presentation. Since there are 9 groups each talk will be 4 minutes long. During each talk each group in the audience should write 1 question for the speaking group, and hand it to them at the end of their presentation. The speaking group should add a page to their website by Thursday 11/3 giving the questions (and the group who asked it) and an answer to the question.




last revision 11/1/11 - updated info on q/a for the presentations