Space Apps Challenge 2017

PROJECT BACKGROUND

Day in day out, geographers, business men, researchers,students, and others are faced with the challenge of understanding complex scientific terms. Most discouraging is the fact that available resources are few, limited and outdated.

Professional bodies and organizations have invaluable data which the public and scientists alike encounter difficulty interpreting. Hence a vacuum in the learning system. LexOrb solves this problem.

CHALLENGES FACED

• How do we acquire reliable data from the public?
• How do we boost public participation in crowd sourcing?
• How do we make this information available in local languages?
• How do we visualize data and make it easily understandable and fun to peruse?
• How do we structure and categorize retrieved data?
• How do we carter for search of abbreviations and acronyms?

WHAT WE BUILT

A dictionary in a dictionary. Earth in a book. LexOrb runs on a Nginx server and makes use of varnish for web acceleration. Digicert SSL and Global Sign for security and Amazon route name server. Email services like Send Grid, Google Apps for business, Sender Policy Frame(SPF) will be used. It will be hosted on AWS to ensure scalability.

The following frameworks were implored for development:

• HTML5
• CSS3
• PHP
• Laravel
• Ruby On Rails
• JS Frameworks: Ionic, Jquery, Electron, Facebook SDK, React, HTML5 History API, Webpack, Javascript Game Engine, Video JS, and D3.js for data visualization.

Taking best practices into cognizance, we have used these technologies to develop a learning experience that truly makes study and research into science as a whole and the earth as a case in point a thrilling experience.

Users have access to crowd sourced data which is properly categorized and presented through texts, audios, images, videos, animations, simulations, charts and interesting games without losing sight of the target; “Knowledge Acquisition”. Fun facts are also presented to the user at intervals. The coolest part is that all these information is accessible in a language of choice and statistics are localized by making use of geo-location except the user indicates otherwise.

In order to ensure accuracy and reliability of user submissions, all submissions are validated by acknowledged experts in the field of concern. As a means to boost public participation in crowd-sourcing, incentives are introduced. Users and editors alike are credited and referenced as the case may be on their submissions. Top contributors are rewarded and users get to gain more recognition in their field as they interact via the forum/community feature of the site. Our algorithm makes good use of key-value pairs to connect acronyms and abbreviations with their full meaning. With a technology like G-translate, we intend translating all content to other languages. Translated content is always verified for semantics as well.

LexOrb is BIG. IT IS THE FUTURE. In the near future, LexOrb becomes the repository of all scientific knowledge.

RESOURCES USED

• NASA Human Spaceflight acronyms
• NASA Space Communications and
• Navigation acronyms
• NASA Science site glossary
• NASA Science current, past, and future Earth Science missions
• NASA image library (includes audio and video)
• NASA’s Software Robotics and Simulation Division
• NASA Scientific Visualization Studio
• NASA’s citizen science projects
• NASA's Earth Science Data Systems Program
• NASA's Earth data site

Other Resources:

• Merriam-Webster: Check out the Earth section
• https://visuwords.com/
• Geology.com
• Earth Explorer