FINFO

Inspiration

A number of fisheries and related agencies have separate methods for the collection, storage, and representation of data that they obtain during their daily operations.

It would be so much more convenient if there was a single unified way to manage this data so that everyone can build apps and analyze the data that is available.

And thus, FINFO was born.

What it does

FINFO provides a set of standards for the collection and storage of data. It also provides a standard for querying data through RESTful API's.

How we built it

After browsing through various data sets provided by the NOAA and a few other agencies, we analyzed the data and looked for common points that we could use to produce a standard format.

We then implemented a server hosted on IBM Bluemix to process and serve data, along with a webapp that users can use to browse the data.

Challenges we ran into

Our team had no prior experience with Bluemix, so setting that up was quite a challenge. We also had little experience with server technology such as nodeJS so we had to learn that as well.

We also had to learn some of the terminology that is used by fisheries, in order to understand the data we are looking at.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A working implementation of our server on Bluemix and our webapp.

What we learned

Data interoperability is a difficult challenge. Defining standards is a difficult challenge as well.

What's next for FINFO

Further development of the standard to support more data, along with techniques for querying and submitting data.

Built With

Submitted to

Fishackathon 2016

Created by

As a developer, my responsibilities were related to working with the others to come up with some technical specifications based on the requirements provided by the client, including an overall set of milestones for the project and the different components that we should tackle.

Working with David, we put together a NodeJS server, obtained a data storage on Firebase, and got stuff working on IBM Bluemix.

My main contribution to the project, on the dev side, was the development of tools that parse and transform raw data from various sources into our own standard format that we defined.

I also openly ranted a lot about Bluemix the first time we were trying to figure out how to get it to work.

MxyL
My role was Idea Generator. Specifically, I worked on assembling the team, creating the slide deck presentation and delivering the pitch. Also liaised with our Subject Matter Expert at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association to clarify the problem statement and refined our framework for data categorization through the standard we developed..

Nathaniel Chan
I worked on creating the web client for this application. I and Michael also worked to come up with overall architecture of this application. The web client uses React.js and concepts from Material Design. Mostly ECMA Script 6 is used to code and Babel is used to transpile ES6 into ES5. WebPack is used to bundle all ES5 files. I've also worked on a little bit of backend with node.js and express.js.

David Gao
Koko Lee