MY.EARTH

http://youtu.be/5ywaqNvtbv8
MY.EARTH displays a map with pollution areas and markers (the color indicates the type of pollution). Users can choose a location and travel over time from 1970 to nowadays in order to observe changes: higher opacity means that pollution has worsened whereas lighter color shows improvement. Environmental data can be submitted by organizations through a REST API. We plan to build MY.EARTH box in order to make individuals participate by submitting local data from their balcony or their garden.

This project is solving the Earth Day Challenge challenge.

Description

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Team

  • Aditya Geria
  • Alexia Delas
  • Nicolas Noullet
  • Robin Coma Delpérier
  • Stephane Coue

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Objectives

MY.EARTH is a community and environmental app. It creates a visualization of pollution levels changing over time. It aims at raising awareness regarding pollution issues around the globe, both locally and internationally.

Motivations

We think that the planet we are living on deserves care and that it’s our duty to preserve its integrity. “Saving the planet” is a great goal, but it is so big that it may seem unachievable. Nevertheless, we think it actually can be achieved if all mankind is involved. Indeed, even if individuals can help, we believe that sustainable solutions to this major issue require everybody’s help.

In order to get people involved, the first step is to make them aware of the problem. As the challenge suggests, big environmental data sources exist but aren't easily accessible to the general public. Our first goal consists in making relevant data accessible and simple to understand, in short “human readable”.

Results

MY.EARTH website: data visualization

The website called “MY.EARTH” displays a map with areas and markers corresponding to stored environmental data. The color of these elements indicates the type of data while the opacity represents the intensity of pollution.

Users can choose types of pollution they are interested in and move on the map in order to focus on a specific geographic area. They can get more information about markers and areas by clicking on them. Last but not least, they can travel over time, from 1970 to nowadays, in order to observe changes: higher opacity means that pollution has worsened whereas lighter color shows improvement.

MY.EARTH website: data submission

A weekend is quite short and we decided not to focus on specific data sources provided in the challenge. We rather designed a generic structure to store dated and geolocalized environmental data. Such a structure can be manipulated (created, read and deleted) through an interface (API) that follows standards of the Internet (RESTful).

Thus, organizations can easily submit data they gathered in order to make them available on MY.EARTH. A website form also allows manual data submissions.

MY.EARTH box: get people involved

However, we think that data visualization is only the first step. Indeed, it’s hard to make people really involved by using only unidirectional means. We had an idea: how about allowing everybody to submit data?

Nowadays, hardware becomes cheaper and more accessible to everybody thanks to Arduino or Raspberry platforms. Thanks to these technologies, we could build affordable environmental stations, called “MY.EARTH Box”, that collect environmental data and submit them to MY.EARTH thanks to the API we developed. In a matter of seconds, such data would be accessible to everybody through the map.

We think that MY.EARTH associated with MY.EARTH Box can really be a game-changer. Most people consult thermometers, barometers or weather stations on a daily basis and spend significant time talking about weather changes. With MY.EARTH, people could rather talk about environmental evolution and help change it for the better!

Technologies


Project Information

License: MIT License
Source Code/Project URL: https://github.com/robinComa/SpaceApps_Tlse.git

Resources

Web Application Demo - http://my-skate-spots.com/SpaceApps_Tlse/
Android Application - https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/15281846/SpaceApps_Tlse.apk
GitHub Client repository - https://github.com/robinComa/SpaceApps_Tlse.git
GitHub Server repository - https://github.com/noullet/earthday-server.git
MY.EARTH project presentation (slides) - http://fr.slideshare.net/noullet/space-apps-my-earth-project
MY.EARTH project document (in French) - https://www.dropbox.com/s/hhwkw7pppnnwe1v/Earthday%20Challenge%20-%20MY%20EARTH%20%28fr%29.pdf