zoohackathon

Inspiration

Climate change is a very real threat that we face right now. Climate change is directly related to depletion of natural flora and fauna. If we don't do something right now, human race will soon cease to exist. This hackathon gives us a direct opportunity to get involved in saving wildlife and stop wildlife trafficking which will in turn save our natural fauna.

What it does

We built a price monitoring web app that keeps the current price trends of different animals being sold online. This can be used to search any species with different tags and it will give us the price change over the years.

How I built it

The data for this was collected using a Python Crawler that can be used to crawl across various websites and collect information about the ads being displayed. This data was again processsed using a NLP model to extract prices and specific keywords. The processed data was kept in a mongo database annd we used a node server to fetch the data from the database and an angular app for the dashboard.

Challenges I ran into

The biggest challenge we ran into was Time. Time was needed to scrape the data from different websites. Also due to time constraints, our NLP model could extract all the keywords from the description, we could have improved this model to only extract relevant keywords.

What's next for zoohackathon

Our next challenge for zoohackathon is to improve aQuSe. With sufficient time and data, aQuSe can directly be used by authorities to monitor price changes in the animal trade market. Also it can identify any anomaly in such trends thus can be used for detecting illegal trades of endangered species.

Built With

• css
• html
• javascript
• jupyter-notebook
• python
• typescript