CB00881 Smart Cities

Enough about out project. Let's talk about something else. What do you think about when you hear the words “data leak”? For me personally, controversial hacks to famous social networks and online stores come to mind. But that’s the thing, that’s not the only data you should be worried about leaking... there’s a lot more information about you out there than you know. There’s a lot more research going into this than you think, too. One’s presence on the Internet, trace, contributions and records can be called our Digital Footprint. For you to be reading this, you must certainly have one too. For an increasing majority (me included), this footprint extends way beyond our awareness, spreading far beyond boundaries with (or without) intention. This footprint is commonly broken down into active and passive traces, data exhaust is part of the latter. Rather than being data that people consciously create, it’s data that people unintentionally generate, unaware that it res...

This week we set out to continue tackling the uploading of data to the Arcgis platform, it has become more of a hassle than we could've anticipated. More so when using REST for data upload. Both using the desktop application and the web map, it's as easy as cliking "add" and selecting a csv, so more tinkering is still needed. We also had a meeting with the Alberta team and they seem to be on the same page with us, as far as development goes. They're experimenting with loading the data from an Arcgis map to their own app. One main point both teams came to is about exactly what data actually has to be stored in Arcgis, and the schema we should use to have the most relevant info in Arcgis without overloading the data. Also, the ways in which we're planning to identify each place across databases. Something that might be useful to store is the type of place that each point represents, so that we can organize them into layers that group similar types together. ...

Writing all these posts down takes some time, wow. Specially if we really want to make them worth reading. But honestly, it's starting to feel like just following a strict, obligatory protocol than anything else. A bunch of the time spent writing these down could most certainly be better spent in actually doing the things we plan for, instead. Just saying. Anyways... Right now our plan is to continue on top of what we accomplished last week. Most buttons are not really functional yet, and a lot is just demonstrative. Hopefully by next week the user will be able to move across and interact in ways of adding info to our system. Also, Patrick from the Alberta University is trying to get us on a meeting to discuss some aspects of this all. So we might as well be on the look for any news. image obtained from https://tealswan.com/teals-blog/something-to-look-forward-to/

And here we are again. Another week gone by. Assuming you're somewhat interested in what that was for me, take a sit and read on. Though I'm betting you're already sitting. Excuse me if these posts are a bit repetitive, but it's very likely for them to be. We are required to post both a team update and a personal update each week, so of course these two will share lots in common. For me, my work this past week for this project consisted in researching different ways one can communicate with Arcgis services, deciding for one, and then throwing it away after working with it a bit. The second choice though, and current one, has resulted to be a lot more promising for our needs: their REST API. But as has been mentioned in my previous post , usability-wise we've found ourselves looking for answers in places outside of their official documentation. So I've been looking at ways to solve this. I can't think of a good way to end this post properly, so I'l...

Hey there! hope you're having a nice Saturd... wait, it's Tuesday now? Hmmm then I guess this comes to you later than expected, then. Although, are you really in a state of expectation for these posts? I mean, you probably landed here just out of curiosity, or boredom. And thus the date for this is not really that important at all... okay, enough of that. We can still relate to you the facts of last week in the same way. Because, well, last week continues to be what last week was. And will forever be. We advanced the platform up a few notches, mostly with regards to use cases like logging in/signing up and navigation indicators across the different views. Here's a sneak peak: What do you think? don't you dare say that Minerva isn't the cutest thing you've seen today. We also spent some time connecting our components even further, like sending landmarks to Arcgis. This has proven to be more complicated than we thought, simply because their documentat...

Continuing on where we left off , we've changed our plan. Trying to figure out work-arounds STEPS is really no different, functionality wise, to just uploading the landmarks data ourselves to an Arcgis map. So, this week we'll divide our responsibilities as follows: Luly: front-end for our web platform Chuy: data scrapping for Edmonton landmarks Martell: sending data to an Arcgis map using Golang The whole point of this is that by the end of the week, our platform will be both more visually appealing, easy to use and functional. And with this, I think the perfect time has come, once more, to quote the wise Leonard Snart... image obtained from https://i.pinimg.com/originals/11/16/bf/1116bfb84800e4490ec2255a441452e7.jpg