# DashLab

DashLab is a way for individuals and businesses to share and collaborate within a data-driven environment through a real-time data visualization dashboard web application.

# The Overview

Within any corporate environment you'll find individuals working on some sort of analysis or analytics projects in general. Under one company, and sometimes even within teams, you'll find a loose approach to drilling down to the necessary insight that in the end drives both the low-level, daily decisions and the higher level, higher pressure ones. What often happens is at the same time these teams or employees will struggle to translate these findings to the necessary personnel.

There's so much going on when it comes to deriving necessary information that it often becomes less powerful as a business function. DashLab provides a simple, eloquent, and intuitive solution that brings together the need to save, share, and show this data. Whether it's a debriefing between internal teams across different departments, or be it a key process that involves internal and external influence, DashLab provides users with a collaborative and necessary environment for real-time drill-down data investigation.

# Other

To utilize full functionality of this website, test the real-time drill down events by viewing the site from two different clients. Open a web browser and visit the site from two different tabs, sort through the available fields within the line graph visualization, and click on cities and countries to see both tabs update to the current selection. **Total mobile compatibility not supported.**
## Inspiration

We wanted to be able to allow people to understand the news they read in context because often times, we ourselves will read about events happening on the other side of the globe, but we have no idea where it is. So we wanted a way to visualize the news along with it's place in the world.

## What it does

Visualize the news as it happens in real-time, all around the world. Each day, GLOBEal aggregates news and geotags it, allowing the news to be experienced in a more lucid and immersive manner. Double click on a location and see what's happening there right now. Look into the past and see how the world shifts as history is made.

## How we built it

We used WebGL's Open Globe Platform to display magnitudes of popularity that were determined by a "pagerank" we made by crawling google ourselves and using WebHose API's. We used python scripts to create these crawlers and API calls, and then populated JSON files. We also used javascript with google maps, here maps, and google news apis in order to allow a user to double click on the globe to see the news from that location.

## Challenges we ran into

Google blocked our IPs because our web crawler made too many queries/second
Our query needs were too many for the free version of WebHose, so we called them and got a deal where they gave us free queries in exchange for attribution. So shout out to [webhose.io](http://webhose.io)!!!

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

Learned how to make web crawlers, how to use javascript/html/css, and developed a partnership with Webhose
Made a cool app!

## What we learned

Javascript, Firebase, webhose, how to survive without sleep

## What's next for GLOBEal News

INTERGALACTIC NEWS!
Work more on timelapse
Faster update times
Tags on globe directly
Click through mouse rather than camera ray
## Inspiration

This project was a response to the events that occurred during Hurricane Harvey in Houston last year, wildfires in California, and the events that occurred during the monsoon in India this past year. 911 call centers are extremely inefficient in providing actual aid to people due to the unreliability of tracking cell phones. We are also informing people of the risk factors in certain areas so that they will be more knowledgeable when making decisions for travel, their futures, and taking preventative measures.

## What it does

Supermaritan provides a platform for people who are in danger and affected by disasters to send out "distress signals" specifying how severe their damage is and the specific type of issue they have. We store their location in a database and present it live on react-native-map API. This allows local authorities to easily locate people, evaluate how badly they need help, and decide what type of help they need. Dispatchers will thus be able to quickly and efficiently aid victims. More importantly, the live map feature allows local users to see live incidents on their map and gives them the ability to help out if possible, allowing for greater interaction within a community. Once a victim has been successfully aided, they will have the option to resolve their issue and store it in our database to aid our analytics.

Using information from previous disaster incidents, we can also provide information about the safety of certain areas. Taking the previous incidents within a certain range of latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates, we can calculate what type of incident (whether it be floods, earthquakes, fire, injuries, etc.) is most common in the area. Additionally, by taking a weighted average based on the severity of previous resolved incidents of all types, we can generate a risk factor that provides a way to gauge how safe the range a user is in based off the most dangerous range within our database.

## How we built it

We used react-native, MongoDB, Javascript, NodeJS, and the Google Cloud Platform, and various open source libraries to help build our hack.

## Challenges we ran into

Ejecting react-native from Expo took a very long time and prevented one of the members in our group who was working on the client-side of our app from working. This led to us having a lot more work for us to divide amongst ourselves once it finally ejected.
Getting acquainted with react-native in general was difficult. It was fairly new to all of us and some of the libraries we used did not have documentation, which required us to learn from their source code.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

Implementing the Heat Map analytics feature was something we are happy we were able to do because it is a nice way of presenting the information regarding disaster incidents and alerting samaritans and authorities. We were also proud that we were able to navigate and interpret new APIs to fit the purposes of our app. Generating successful scripts to test our app and debug any issues was also something we were proud of and that helped us get past many challenges.

## What we learned

We learned that while some frameworks have their advantages (for example, React can create projects at a fast pace using built-in components), many times, they have glaring drawbacks and limitations which may make another, more 'complicated' framework, a better choice in the long run.

## What's next for Supermaritan

In the future, we hope to provide more metrics and analytics regarding safety and disaster issues for certain areas. Showing disaster trends overtime and displaying risk factors for each individual incident type is something we definitely are going to do in the future.