Taxonomia

A Rails app for creating, sharing, and exploring taxonomies and other hierarchically-structured data.

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Inspiration

The inspiration for this project came from the theme of this hackathon as well as a data science ontologies course that I am currently taking. Taxonomies are just one form of ontology, but they are central to our understanding of the world around us -- both as it is now and as it was in the time of dinosaurs. By creating taxonomies, we have come to understand the relationships between living things. I wanted to create something that gives anyone the ability to contribute to this understanding.

What it does

Taxonomia gives users a way to create, explore, and share taxonomies and other data hierarchies. With an intuitive interface, Taxonomia facilitates discovery of ideas (either new the user or new to the world) through open-source, crowdsourced data classification.

How I built it

I decided to use Ruby on Rails to speed up development of this project. I utilized bootstrap and SCSS to further streamline the development process so that I could focus mainly on logic. After prototype the overall design in Framer, I began making a rudimentary version of the project without any visual flare. I started with the significant models and attributes that would be required (e.g. taxonomies, nodes, ownerships, and their titles, descriptions, and so on). I then moved on to the relations between these objects (e.g. a taxonomy can have many nodes, and nodes belong to taxonomies, but nodes can also have and belong to other nodes). I then spent a long time making sure users could actually create new taxonomies, add nodes to them, add child nodes to those nodes, delete nodes, and so on. The rest of the time was spent touching up the design.

Challenges I ran into

The main challenge I ran into was the structure of the database, specifically in regard to self-referential nodes and the associations between them and other models. I had to revise my database migrations several times in order to get all of the relations working correctly.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I think the end result is fairly useable, though there is much room for improvement. I like the design overall. I'm proud of the idea since it has both utilitarian and creative aspects to it, so a more polished version could have a good amount of appeal.

What I learned

Throughout this project, I routinely underestimated how long different portions of the app would take. Having worked through the underlying logic on paper beforehand, but actually implementing the login in Rails, using an opinionated environment that I am largely inexperienced with, was more difficult than expected (and thus took longer than expected). Similarly, I wanted to host my project on Google Cloud with a custom domain, but I started the process of getting these set up earlier this morning -- and am still awaiting various confirmations before my site can go live.

What's next for Taxonomia

  • Authentication
  • Import and export taxonomies as JSON
  • Add a way to share links/codes/QR Codes
  • Allow more customization (e.g. allow users to add custom labels, select color palette, increase horizontal 'canvas' size, etc.)
  • Add additional ways to view data (e.g. plain list form, web, mind map, etc.)
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