WikiNotes

Inspiration

The inspiration for WikiNotes was quite simply all the students and classmates we notice struggling to create efficient notes. Our vision was to reduce the work for students, especially for taking notes or studying for exams. Instead of spending time scrolling through the internet, finding the useful information and formulas for a particular topic, an example being circles, and then typing up all that information into a document, WikiNotes automates this process and generates clean, simple, topic-based notes for any subject matter.

What it does

WikiNotes allows the user to input a particular topic (e.g Circles, or Rectangles), and it takes information from Wikipedia (temporary). Our program sorts the information by topic and generates note slides for the user. Additionally, we have an edit and save feature which allows the user to edit the slides and add or delete any piece of information, and then save it into a downloadable PDF document.

How we built it

We built our UI in HTML/Javascript/CSS, and used Java Servlets to connect it with Java code. We then retrieved data through Java IO and built a custom filter to get meaningful data for the slides. Additionally, we used the library pdfcrowd to convert the HTML to a PDF to be downloaded by the user.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges we ran into while developing WikiNotes were the following: integrating Java Servlet with the frontend of the application (HTML, CSS, Javascript), and extracting the data from Wikipedia and filtering information to create content for slides

What's next for WikiNotes

Our future plans include the following:

Deploy on a website that supports POST (Github pages only support static websites)
- Currently running on a local tomcat server
Improve overall design and UI
Improve filtering of information gathered from websites using machine learning techniques
Add support for automatic image generation per topic
Use machine learning structures in order to optimize the project
Make it eventually able to locate most reliable sources of information through number of hits per webpage and other factors