Customizable field guides for Antarctic travelers.
A project with SCAR-MarBIN and ANTABIF
THE PROJECT
The aim of Antartic Field Guides is to help scientist and amateurs their preparation for a trip to the Antarctica. With AFG they can create a Field Guide with all the species they are interested in.
The pages are generated on-the-fly from the contents of authoritative, quality controlled data resources, and ensures the user to access up-to-date information about the group of organisms he/she is particularly interested in. Even if the primary focus is for scientists, the AFGs are open and free for all to enjoy.
What we made:
- Interaction and visual design
- Front and back development
- GIS development
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THE CHALLENGE
Generating a useful field guide for scientist is not an easy task, specially when you have to be prepared for thousands of species. Additionally providing context to the data to make it more meaningful and enjoyable is exactly the kind of challenges we love at Vizzuality.
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THE SOLUTION
We have to developed a custom solution to generate good PDFs on the fly and allow for sharing. Connecting multiple sources, like Wikipedia, Panoramio and taxonomic services allowed us to provide the needed context. Finally the use of OpenLayers to display a polar projection in a beautiful map was a great solution.
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THE RESULTS
An enjoyable and easy to use tool, focused on trying to achieve the optimal user experience during the creation of the guide.
On the technical side, the designed software architecture has proven to be solid and performable, offering great results on speed and stability.
HIGHLIGHTS
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Custom map tiles
Look mama! We are not using Google Maps! Creating tiles and caching them provides a much better user experience.
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Quality information
Working with scientist can be hard, but is definitely the best way to get the best data. A custom backoffice allows them to enter the information and link with external resources.
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Enhanced taxonomic explorer
For this project we made a great effort in improving previous solutions on taxonomy browsing. We think this is the best Taxonomic Browser we have done up to date and is all pure HTML+JS!.