myearthobserver

Value Proposition: As a product, My Earth Observer serves as a decision support tool for Agriculturists, City Planners and Aerospace Engineers.

Functionality: My Earth Observer works by overlaying NASA images of different geography-based parameters on Google Maps, and allowing the user to map out the boundaries of the location they are interested in observing. The user can then go on to set the different dates and create an animation that visualizes how that terrain has changed.As a decision support tool, My Earth Observer can be utilized by farmers to practice Precision Agriculture, by getting data for specific areas of their mapped out farms. This will help them plan important farming activities like crop rotation.

Governments and Policy Makers can use these images for policy issues like border control, desertification control and population growth studies. Several professional fields can find useful applications for this tool. For example, Energy Entrepreneurs can know which areas to best plant solar farms using the Solar Insolation data and animation.

Scalability: Going beyond the two-day hackathon provided to code this application, precision tools can be built in to allow the following: • A user can see the actual values for each of these parameters in order to make better decisions. • Since imagery data may not make sense to all users, graphical data can be included that graphically shows how a terrain has changed using the actual values stated above. This kind of visualization can enable Surveyors and Real Estate Merchants add value to their client propositions about an area. • Very interestingly, we can overlay maps from other organizations such as the WHO that show users which diseases are rampant in a particular location, and pings them these notifications when they change location.

Sustainability: Eventually, the NASA already has web services and APIs that display all these data. Ours is to consume these sources, make them more user friendly and adoptable. We have achieved this through: Platformization: The android platform is the most used globally and My Earth Observer has been built using standard Google Documantation for android development. This ensure that android users globally can easily interact with the application. With funding, the application can be extended to Microsoft’s rapidly growing Windows Phone Platform, where it would run with Bing Maps. Documentation: Despite the limited hackathon period, we were still able to implement step by step guides on how to navigate through the application in the Help Section.

Profitability: Selling Data to professionals who need it. Getting local data and images from Nigeria’s Communication Satellites to empower local small and medium enterprises.

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