Kewin Dousse

Context

This project was developed for the course "Visualisation de l'Information" in the first year of the MSE Master's degree.

The course's goal is to understand how to use key concepts of the human vision in order to design effective data visualizations. We were free to pick a subject of our choice and make a project to apply what we learnt by groups of 2 or 3 people. We decided of our theme after finding the NUFORC data source, which we used as a starting point.

Model

The app is divided into 2 distinct parts. The first one, UFO-parser, parses the NUFORC website and its pages to build a MongoDB database. We'll then use that database to feed our web page.

The second part is a server showing our one-page app. The page lets the user filter the data in multiple ways, some of which will trigger a query to the server and the database.

Result

The resulting app is a page that lets the user pick which time frame they find interesting, filter the viewing by shape and see them both on an interactive map, aggregated on a time graph, and spread into a word cloud.

The page works great on both desktop and mobile. However due to the amount of data we got, the server is too resource consuming to let us keep a running instance publicly. You can still build your own database and run an instance of the server by using UFO-parser and UFO-viewer.

Images