Techpedia | Dictionary of Earth
The Challenge | Dictionary of Earth
Techpedia
Techpedia aims to allow both scientists and general public to understand different terms and acronyms used in various fields of knowledge and contribute by adding or modifying entries in a collaborative way.
Techpedia
Because humans don’t understand klingon
In this project we intend to develop a website and mobile application to allow users (both scientists and general public) to understand different terms and acronyms used in various fields of knowledge and also to contribute by adding new entries and modifying the existing ones if the need arises.
Why?
Has it happened to you that you were reading a book or watching a movie on Netflix and you find a weird term that you don’t understand? It surely has. Probably it has also happened that you were talking with someone and they use a term or an acronym that you know but that it means something different to you than what it means to them.
That is something that happens everyday in teams with interdisciplinary members when they try to express their ideas to other members or other teams. They try to express themselves using terms from their field of knowledge and they fail because their “jargon” is not the same as the one used in other fields.
We try to help by categorizing the different acronyms and concepts in an easy-to-use tool and allowing users to add or modify entries in a collaborative way.
What?
The tool consists of a responsive website that let’s you search for any acronym or term. You can also explore by navigating through different fields. For example, if you want to find terms used in Algebra you could navigate to Science -> Mathematics -> Algebra.
If you don’t find the term you are looking for, you can add it! You can also edit an item if you find that it’s wrong or needs more information.
There are thousands, of technical and scientific acronyms and terms. With more than 14000 terms and acronyms extracted from NASA’s Human Spaceflight acronyms it would take 190 days of constant manual data entry for a team of three, spending just a minute per entry, to finish. This project can’t succeed without crowdsourcing, it can't succeed without you.
How?
This idea aims to bring different fields of knowledge together and to clarify “jargon” terms to the general audience. In a future, you could search for a term used in your field of knowledge and find a synonym or a related word used in another field. Or you could search for a word you heard and find out if there’s a word you know that expresses the same concept. Or maybe look up for a “common word” and find out what’s the right term to express something similar in different disciplines.
By being a collaborative tool, this project can grow limitless thanks to users and their ideas.
Resources used
SpaceApps is a NASA incubator innovation program.