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 ...
plot the data geographically using different icons/colours
for the different types of sightings. You will very likely
want to come up with some higher level categories for the many
different sighting types (cigar, changing, chevron, circle,
cylinder, diamond, disk, egg, fireball, flash, formation,
light, other, oval, rectangle, sphere, teardrop, triangle,
unknown, etc) to reduce the number of categories
allow the user to pan and zoom the map
allow the user to choose a range of months or years or times
of day and only show the sightings within that time range
the application should update quickly when the user
interacts
For a
B you need to add ...
clicking on the icon for a sighting should show the original
submitted data
investigate whether sightings occur near airports by
plotting the locations of airports and highlighting those
sightings near an airport and by plotting sightings vs
distance from the nearest airport on a graph
investigate whether sightings occur in remote areas by
plotting showing the population of the areas with sightings
and by plotting the number of sightings vs population density
on a graph
investigate how sightings correlate to the time of day/night
by plotting the number of sightings vs time of day on a graph
investigate how sightings correlate to months or seasons by
plotting the number of sightings vs time of year on a graph
let the user choose specific types of sighting or all
sightings for these visualizations
For
an A you need to add ...
allow the user to play back the sightings on the map as a
movie
cluster the data to give the user a higher level view of
where different types of sightings occur
investigate whether sightings are increasing or decreasing
over the 2000s
try two other reasonable possible correlations and add that
data into your interface e.g. the visibility of Venus,
locations of weather stations, military bases, etc
find some interesting things in the data and highlight them
on your webpage through screen snapshots
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