Species Explorer :: Max Antinori :: 6/13/08

We had a good turnout (and great assortment of cookies and snacks from Chinatown... including the dreaded pork cookies) for Max Antinori's presentation of his Species Explorer project.

Here's some notes:

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Max :: Species Explorer
http://www.speciesexplorer.org

• Max likes outdoorsy stuff and wanted something for tree and/or animal identification. He decided to build something for all species
• Species Explorer is a site with tools to record nature sightings (plants and animals)
• FlashLite didn’t seem adequate, so this seemed like a good way to get into Flex
• Goal: use technology for getting outdoors and learning about wildlife. Focus on young people or kids w/ parents. There’s a current movement to connect young people w/ outdoors.

Maps

• Google recently came up with AS3 API. Wasn’t available when Species Explorer was in development initially
• Species Explorer uses Modest Maps (http://www.modestmaps.com/) which hooks into tiles from multiple maps. Works with AS3 and AS2. Supposedly works with FlashLite.
• Currently hooking into Microsoft Maps.

Flex

• The main application was built with Flex
• When upload an image, it gets resized with PHP’s GD.

Animal Taxonomy

• Enter the name, searches against ITIS’s (http://www.sp2000.org/) database, which has been entered in SpeciesExplorer.org’s database.
• The site searches Flickr based on the latin name to get up to three images for the animals.
• Also, it links off to Wikipedia based on Latin name, which seems to be pretty effective.
• Potentially looking for another partner for species information (e.g. http://www.eol.org/)

Facebook

• Additionally, there’s a Facebook application for displaying the data.

Chumby

• Application built for Chumby as well

Data Communication (future thoughts)

• May use AMPPHP and maybe Swix (which will work with Flash Lite). Also BlazeDS is a free, open-source version of Live Cycle Data Services that close to real-time data communication.

AS3

• Consensus that e4x is much better for working with XML.
• Joe Berkovitz created MVCS (S = services) that uses a design pattern that’s helpful for setting up Flex apps. This was used in Species Explorer to help keep it scalable.

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Next month (7/11), Eric Rosenbaum will be presenting. More information on what will be covered soon...

-Brian