pictroid

Team

• Habib Rehman (Manager | Front-end | Back-end)
• Joshua Smith (Front-end)
• Jack Doiron (Back-end)

Winner of the "Best Use of Data" Award for Virtual International Participation

• We are honoured to have been awarded the "Best Use of Data" Award for VIRTUAL INTERNATIONAL PARTICIPATION. It was very competitive but Pictroid succeeded. Thanks to all our supporters!

About

The sky is falling, but you can help! Post a pic to help us track Near-Earth Objects and save the chickens from destruction.

Pictroid is an open-source space imagery social network that was created to complete the Asteroid Imagery Sharing Challenge. The app is being designed specifically to empower both researchers and hobbyists to both share and collaborate on their scientific discoveries. It will provide a chatting system where users can discuss the images, a tagging system for easy categorization of space imagery, and meta graphs that are based on astronomical data that users have attached to the images.

Our vision does not stop there; we envisage a service where the images and information shared by Pictroidians can be amalgamated into a massive knowledge base of extraterrestrial activity. This data could be used to calculate orbits, track near earth objects, and discover habitable planets. The potential is endless!

During the Space Apps Challenge, we were able to get an up-and-running version of the project, but it is a large endeavor for a small team, and as a result, the current version is a bit alpha.

• We are honoured to have been awarded a RedHat OpenShift Resource Grant (http://openshift.com/) and a $2,000/month Rackspace (http://rackspace.com/) grant for cloud services (image storage). Thank you for your support.

Things we got done:

- Basic Flickr integration

- Basic Kimono integration

- Server and Base Project

- UI views

In the future, we plan to add/finish:

- Astronomical data system.

- Database integration with more space image APIs.

- User system.

---- Basic user system. <-- Finished!

---- Conversation system. <-- Temporarily implemented using Disqus. Will be revised later.

---> Image upload system.

- Image categorization system.

- Meta graphs based on image data.

Credits

Many thanks to Kimono Labs (http://www.kimonolabs.com/) for letting us use their service for free! Their web scrapper utility is critical for the next stage of the Pictroid project.

We also owe much gratitude to Parse (https://www.parse.com/) for giving us a free pro account that we can use for backend services.

We also rely on the storage provided by Rackspace for user-uploaded images and are hosted on the RedHat OpenShift PaaS.

Project Information

Resources