Team #4

Project title: UFO Siter

Description:

Vision

This website plots UFO sighting data onto a map of the U.S. and allows the user to interact with it in various ways. A visitor to the site can see all sightings for all dates, and search for specific sitings by location –“Wichita, KS”, or “Whichita” or “Kansas” for example– or choose from a drop-down menu of State names and saved locations. Clicking on any sighting data point will pop up the full sighting record from the database. Media Search panel preferences allow this sighting’s record details to automatically generate a Search listing from YouTube or Google, and allow the visitor to modify the search terms and rate the search results for relevance. Time line data along the bottom allows the visitor to search for sightings by date, date range, or see a chronological “movie” of sightings as they occurred. Finally, the visitor can enter a new sighting record, ideally with photos and/or video of the sighting if they have any. “Community” aspects of the website (top nav) allow the visitor to read more about sightings and connect with others interested in the subject.

Implemention

Map with location of 1000 UFO sightings in the U.S.

Team members names

Brian J Sherman: www.brianjsherman.net, @clarityinfo, me@brianjsherman.net

Sjors Provoost: sprovoost.nl @provoost sjors@sprovoost.nl

Mark M. Muskardin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/markmuskardin, markmuskardin@gmail.com

Affiliation of team members

Met on LinkedIn prior to event.

Datasets used:
UFO sightings from Infochimps:
http://www.infochimps.com/datasets/60000-documented-ufo-sightings-with-text-descriptions-and-metada

Geonames list of U.S. cities and coordinates:
http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/  (US.zip)

Software used:
Ruby on Rails
MySQL
Google Maps API
Heroku
(Github, TextMate, Photoshop)

API’s used:
We downloaded the datasets. We used Google Maps API to plot.

Work done with the dataset before the event:

None.

Screenshots: (from presentation)
Vision:

Implementation so far:

Process:

Link to the result:
http://bit.ly/UFOmap
Source: https://github.com/eaturspinach/ufo-mashup/