FP-kueda-n8agrin-mcd
From CS294-10 Visualization Fa07
Contents |
[edit] Proposal
iNaturalist.org will be a community where birders, fishers, foragers, and anyone who sees cool things outside can record and share their observations from the natural world. We are developing the site as a Masters final project at the School of Information. While there are many potential challenges we could meet with information visualization, we have chosen to focus on
- comparing lists of species observed
- finding people with similar interests
- increasing awareness of biodiversity
[edit] Group Members
- Nate Agrin
- Andrew McDiarmid
- Ken-ichi Ueda
[edit] Description
By combining a tree with simple lists and bar graphs, we think we can develop an intriguing and useful visualization that will allow people to compare lists of species they have seen with other users, lists from groups, and lists from geographic areas.
[edit] Initial Problem Presentation
[edit] Sketches
These images show the development of our ideas, including other solutions that we eventually discarded.
[edit] Tree Diff Idea with Two Lists
Shows species seen by you and number of times you've seen them relative to some other list, like a friend, or a place, or a group. Maps the list to a taxonomic or phylogenetic tree to reveal evolutionary relationships between organisms in the list.
[edit] Tree Diff Idea with One List
[edit] Tree Diff Idea Hand-drawn
[edit] Friend Finder Idea
This was in response to the problem of finding other naturalists with similar interests. It's a social network graph where edges convey "species in common," or species that both people have seen.
[edit] Rarity Cloud Idea
This was a rough sketch of a way to see what observations were of rare species in a given area. Each item in the cloud would represent an observation, and its distance from the center of the cloud would be inversely proportional to how commonly it was observed in this area.
[edit] Time Map Idea
Combining timelines with maps has been done before, but we think it's an appropriate combination for observational data. Saved map states could also facilitate analysis of the data, or maybe lead to collaborative visualization discussions, a la sense.us.
[edit] Zoom Tree Idea
When traversing a taxonomic tree, clicking on a node would bring up a detailed view of that taxon, including your own observations of it and perhaps your friends'.
[edit] Midpoint Design Discussion
Midpoint Design Discussion Slides
[edit] Final Deliverables
- Observation Explorer: login is username:test, password:test
- Download source -- this is a Ruby on Rails app, so it will require some knowledge of Rails. It will try to install the dependent gems the first time you run it, but it still might require some finagling to get it to run.
- Caveats -- we were unable to implement every feature mentioned in the paper, including
- cross-year comparison
- adding species with auto-completing search (search and autocomplete works, but does not add data)
- selected species don't show counts
- Bugs -- and of course there are some bugs we didn't get to chase down
- removing selected species doesn't always remove them from the timeline
- rendering raster overlays is still quite slow
- Final Paper in PDF Form
- Final Poster
