mata

hack cupertino project - a website app that allows police to log crimes/accidents

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mata {maps + data}

Website that allows police/trusted officials to report crimes/accidents in the area of cupertino (works globally though)

Languages used: HTML, CSS, JavaScript

APIs used: Google Maps JS API, Google Maps Geocoding API, Google Firebase API

Google Maps JS API - used for displaying the map along with its data and accessing the map's data

Google Maps Geocoding API - used for converting the address text input into coordinates usable by the JS API (geocoding)

Google Firebase API - used as data base for police logs of crimes/accidents, works in realtime, helped in displaying past logs, keeps a record of past logs effeciently on the cloud.

What we did

  • Created an interactive website containing a toggleable map interface and another interface below for the police to input any crimes/accidents, specifying the location, type of incident, a description of the event and the severity of the event. Any police submission shows up as a marker at the specified location. All markers indicate some sort of logged event, data from this is all stored in the database keeping a log of data for display of past logs. The markers, when clicked, display the details of the event.

Stuff to do

  • User Authentication (OAuth) to ensure that only trusted individuals can edit the data and others can only view the data
  • Keep track of time in program, allowing for only recent entries to be shown and old ones to be deleted from the database
  • Cluster data when zoomed out enough, allowing for cleaner data visualization (heatmap from api or markerclusters)
  • Add preset descriptions/filler data for quick input
  • Publish accessible website

Things learned

  • Collaboration through Github
  • Working with various Google API's
  • HTML/CSS/JavaScript (whole group had no experience with any web development prior to today)
    • LOTS of syntax learned (the hard way...)
  • Server side programming through firebase
    • Was a pain at first, but got used to it
  • Working with JSON files
  • Time management + task splitting
  • Staying awake on pure sugar

All in all, this was a great learning experience for the whole group, as this was most of our first hackathons

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