Onto

https://youtu.be/8kr-6qbBM_8

https://dev-devant.github.io/Onto/

Problem: as a researcher / developer, when putting together the theoretical framework, or supporting your work, the need to find reliable sources of information arises, in addition to the fact that sometimes you must cover topics that are not entirely your area of expertise. Information is difficult to find as search engines do not prioritize these types of documents. Onto emerges as a search engine interface that feeds on the official NASA and other space agencies databases, interactively showing connections between different topics, and related documentation. This way, it provides search tools if you do not know exactly what you are looking for.

Background: Onto is based on the concept of a project that we presented last year https://2020.spaceappschallenge.org/challenges/create/create-mascot/teams/coffee-storm/project. We had created an interface based on a virtual pet. We took up the concept of a virtual assistant for the graphic design of the tool, and we radically changed the platform and fixed the accessibility problems (we moved from Java to JavaScript to provide online support). The result of the changes was Onto, a friendly computer panda that is the logo of the project, an assistant for researchers.

Onto is a search assistant designed for researchers, to facilitate the search for documents on specific topics or documents that interrelate several disciplines.

It has 3 modes: Discover, Topic and Relates.

Discover: Presents a visualization of the main topics: Aerospace, Applied Science, Apps, Earth Science, Management / Operations, Raw Data Software, Space Science. Each topic is shown as a node connected to other minor nodes, which specify the number of documents that compose them, a tree diagram with branches of topics, and occasionally nodes cross when they have documents that deal with both topics. This provides a hierarchical data visualization to explore related topics or to search for information without fully knowing the topic.

Topic: It is a specific search for a related tag, it is meant to be used when you know exactly what you want to find.

Related: it is a search that shows documents that share different topics. It is designed for researchers who do not know what documentation they are looking for, but they know the topics these cover. Example: plants, aeroponics, gravity. The combination of these tags will show documents related to crops in the space, making it easier to find documentation on more specific topics.

How it works: Onto is a JavaScript-based website that uses the SODA API https://dev.socrata.com/. It uses NASA's open database https://data.nasa.gov/

The source code of the project was created with P5.JS https://p5js.org/, and the files hosted on Github, using the Github website service.

Future expectations: I would like this project to become more widespread and cover more open databases, and to be a tool for researchers that allows not only to base research, thus helping to improve and facilitate the assembly of theoretical frameworks to justify projects and research, unifying everything in one place.

The code repository, open source in JavaScript: https://github.com/Dev-Devant/Onto.git

Onto uses NASA's "open data" database, via the SODA API. The programming language is JavaScript, it receives the JSON files provided by the API and with that build an internal data array for its display and order.

NASA database:

https://data.nasa.gov/

https://data.nasa.gov/browse

NASA data visualizations (to have a starting point)

https://data.nasa.gov/data_visualizations.html

API docs:

https://api.nasa.gov/

How would you describe your Space Apps experience?

An incomparable experience, collaborating and meeting people who share the desire to contribute to science with projects based on challenges. the climate of these events is great.

What did you learn?

Of everything! it is impossible not to learn something new from topics or challenges, it is not my first SpaceApps, and yet every event there are always new opportunities to learn.

inspired your team to choose this challenge?

The need to facilitate the obtaining of information, since when you do not know about a subject but want to know it is difficult to discover information, even if it is open, search engines do not do a good job always showing us what we need.

What was your approach to developing this project?

Graphically attractive, focused on being interactive and intuitive as well as functional, even if this tool is attractive at the time of use.

how did your team resolve setbacks and challenges?

Looking for new tools to solve them, the main obstacle was that I planned to embed it in a free site to host webs, but it did not allow embedding JavaScript code, and I later found that Github had the solution to my problem.

Is there anyone you'd like to thank and why?

Thanks to Ana Escudero, the artist who designed onto!

NASA database:

https://data.nasa.gov/

https://data.nasa.gov/browse

NASA data visualizations (to have a starting point)

https://data.nasa.gov/data_visualizations.html

API docs:

https://api.nasa.gov/

SODA API: https://dev.socrata.com/

p5.js (IDE JavaScript): https://p5js.org/

Github : https://github.com/

#Ontologies, #Code, #html , #javaScript,#p5.js ,#serach

This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.