Pin Point

Inspiration

Our inspiration fully originated from a user deep-dive that we conducted with the research team coming from Harvard Herbaria. During the interview, our team felt the passion that the mentors had towards their research in various fields and identified issues that their teams encountered. We found that research in this field is often non-hypothesis based, but instead, a process of human-centric pattern recognition using metadata and data mining. With the vast amounts of data and decentralized platforms that slowed the researchers' workflow, We wanted to create a simple widget that could simplify and speed up the process of initial research.

What it does

Pin Point simplifies the process of initial research through a centralized GBIF extension. Our target audience is researchers who are searching for an efficient way to conduct research in the field, avoiding the hoops & bounds that are plaguing their current methods of research.

How we built it

Pin Point utilizes ArcGIS, PRISM APIs and web scraping technology to power the chrome extension. We retrieve the data points of occurrences on GBIF and use the data to search through Bionomia's collector database, as well as various other climate databases to represent them graphically on maps.

Challenges we ran into

After the interview with the biodiversity research team, we were flooded with ideas, thoughts, and potential projects. It boiled down to what ultimately simplifies this search process without going through a hassle.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were successfully able to use ArcGIS as a data visualization software. We were also successfully able to integrate maps within the extension to simulate the effect of different historical environmental conditions.

What we learned

We learned that too much implementation and integration can lay grounds for complication. Our goal is ease of access for the users and that is what we accomplished with our project. Feature creep was a significant issue, and we struggled to focus on one central function.