Monkey Tracker v0.1

Project Contents

I General Summary

II Project idea

III Tech n Tools

IV Current Implementation

V To do

I Brief Outline of the current workflow

The primatologist at NYU work at the Tiputini field station, in Ecuador, to collect data about different species of primates. To collect data they will use handheld devices (Palm family) with the appropriate software and different protocols for different data they want to collect. At the end of the day the collected data is transferred to the computers in the labs at the Tiputini field station. The entire data is stored locally in New York on a computer.

II Project idea

The idea for this project resulted from a few sessions at the beginning of the semester. As we were going over the overall activity of the anthropologist in the field and getting an in-depth understanding of (a) what data they collect, (b) how they store the collected data, and (c) what they do with the data, we figured that stream-lining the overall process could benefit the anthropologist and re-structuring their data collection interface as well as a flattening of the database would make this change easier (by leaving a proprietary format and migrating to the open SQL platform). Thinking of the overall goal of the class, the database restructuring was also important to make integration of new data easier, which will be beneficial for the next iteration of the class.

III Tech n Tools

  • mySQL (language to create and query databases)
  • PHP (web-based language)
  • ODK (Google's Open Data Kit - a toolkit for creating data entry forms for handhelds and linking them to dbs)
  • GoogleVizAPI (Google's visualization API let's you whip up decent graphs and charts from data you have)
  • Django (Python based back end for prototyping web-based applications with data)
  • Android (OpenSource platform for mobile devices)

IV Current Implementation

At its current stage the project comprises a full online (SQL) mock up of the Anthropologists' field data. There is an easy to use upload function that allows the user to upload new data into the db via a web interface.

Check out the implementation here: Attach:MonkeyTrackingDataflow.zip

V To-do

  • new handheld interface - see the handheld project
  • new handheld backend
  • data visualization interface