Action Plan 4: Design and implement features for the online PicturePost community.

We propose a suite of enhancements to the PicturePost website to make it as easy and attractive as possible to be a contributor to local, regional and global monitoring efforts.

The goals of this aspect of the project are:

 

1. To investigate a  “crowdsourcing” application to collect, organize, analyze and share PicturePost submissions.
2. To explore ways in which users could “design” their own window into the DEW project, by composing their own web pages.
3. To visualize PicturePost data in intriguing and sophisticated ways.
4. To experiment with a set of social networking services that will foster interaction with the global data repository and with other users across the globe.
5. To prototype a series of electronic alert and reminder systems to invite users to collect data at crucial times of the year.
6. To experiment with alternative observation methods that do not require a physical picturepost (the “virtual” picturepost).
7. To allow others to contribute new online analytical or visualization functions and share them with the community.

 

In general, our system will exploit the most successful techniques of the so-called web 2.0 universe, whereby information is gathered and shared very interactively, at times almost unwittingly, such as when we strengthen the page rank of a web page in Google simply by clicking on a link to it. Thus, we plan to explore blog-like or wiki-like interfaces, using gadgets (as in iGoogle) or widgets (as in Yahoo) to allow the user to assemble their own personal web page that filters through only the aspects of interest to the users, linking them to reports from faraway or nearby places, which may share similarities or simply be of interest to them.

Our application will employ crowdsourcing, which is a web 2.0 neologism that refers to information that is freely generated by “the general public” (the crowd) and not by a specific organization, as is done in traditional outsourcing. The best known example of crowdsourcing is Wikipedia. In general, all citizen science programs are a form of crowdsourcing, although the term is typically applied only to web-based systems.

 

These proposed Web 2.0 tools will be based on City Lab’s LOUIS (Local Online Urban Information System), server-side web-services platform, currently under development at WPI’s City Lab. At the moment, LOUIS consists of low-level functions (APIs – Application Programming Interface) that can be accessed as web services from any web application.