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Weeks 1-3: Old Beginnings
Submitted by Connor Bohan on June 22, 2012 - 11:48am
This is my second year being an intern a CMOP and like last year I'm working with Charles Seaton's data annotation project. I've switched mentors to Alex Jaramillo but that was truly the only change. My senior mentor, David Maier, is the same and I'm working with my old code.
The idea behind the project to allow people interested to comment on the data that the observation network stations collect. Unlike YouTube comments there is real value to be added by doing this. The primary reason is that someone like Charles or the people who work in the field with the stations could annotate data as being erroneous and then the data would not be used by others. There are several reasons data could be erroneous, one such being that instrumentation can fail. My project creates a front-end, user-friendly-ish interface that allows user to easily interact with the back-end that Charles set up. A person using the data annotation interface can select a station, offering, and/or variable and a period of time and give that time-slice a status (good, bad, acceptable, out of date, or other) and some comment text that provides context for that comment. In addition to that, this years project has been expanded to include creating a comment explorer that would allow a user to find comments by the commenter, station, offering, variable, and time of the comment. This was an idea discussed last year but there was not enough time to start work on it.
There were some initial hitches converting the old data annotation interface to a standardized CMOP in-site project. Firstly, all the relative paths were thrown off which needed to be fixed. Secondly, the page size restrictions of the CMOP template was restricting and needed to be accounted for. But after the project was fully moved over I was back to where I left off last year. It was exciting to be able to add many of the features that I didn't have time for last year such as: moving from custom AJAX to jQuery, adding form validation, and adding y-axis selection.
At this point I've also begun work on the comment explorer. It is still in its very early stages and probably will not have even alpha level functionality until next week but its a promising start. So far I've been working on the part of the interface that allows users to select constraints for their search. By next week I should have that done as well as having it display comments. From there its feature-adding, bug hunting, and user-friendlyifying.
