Odysseus

There are various Web 2.0 services available today, to be used by anyone with Internet access, at home, in libraries, and at work, providing a highly-interactive and engaging experience. One of the characteristics of Web 2.0 is the individual users’ contribution in shaping the structure and/or in creating the site contents. For example, Flickr allows its users to upload their personal photos in order to share with their family and friends, resulting in a huge archive of communal photos where anybody can visit and look at other people's shared photos, navigating and searching by the growing ``tags'', the user-provided pieces of text annotation that form a large dictionary; YouTube does a similar service on video clips; more interestingly, Google Earth Community allows its users to produce placemarks of interesting or educational perspectives (e.g. famous restaurants in Paris or golf courses in Scotland) overlayed on top of Google Earth and share with other online users. Being able to contribute and share means the online users form a community of like-minded people, introducing and connecting to each other.

With the growing awareness of our environmental issues (global warming, air/water pollution and natural disasters, and so on), leveraging the community aspect of Web 2.0 phenomenon into the environmental issues will be a very effective way to enhance the environmental awareness. Environmental data comes in numerous forms, but some of the water conditions (temperature, pH level, conductivity, etc.) and air conditions (temperature, humidity, amount of NO2, etc.) are straightforward to understand and regularly captured by data stations around the globe. We are interested in capturing some of these data and visualising them onto a web interface, graphically. One simple way is to overlay the environmental data on Google Earth - the mechanism for publishing/sharing and its base interface is already there, so the issue is to feed the environmental data at the back and to design clever visualisation techniques on top of it. Other than using Google Earth, we are planning on developing more novel graphical visualisation techniques to help scientists discover new patterns/trends in the environmental data, easily accessible on the web. For general public, however, simpler graphs and charts that show environmental data in a more easily-understandable and user-friendly manner will be more important. We are interested in designing a simple courseware for young adults to learn how to make a simple but useful and appealing web page visualising environmental data and share their own creation with other online friends.

The purpose of the proposed internship is to support the development of this courseware, especially simplifying the technical elements that need to be learned and making guidelines/instructions for the students who have little experience in designing a web page. This is a project covering database handling, website design and education.

Supervisors and Mentors:

Dr Hyowon Lee (AIC, DCU)