[Marble-devel] Fwd: GSoC: Weather Data

[John T. Groszko]

Below is a rough draft of my proposal. Feedback would be awesome!

Thanks!
John Groszko

----
*
*Name: John Groszko
E-Mail Address: grosjoh1 at iit.edu
Freenode IRC Nick: jgroszko
Location: Chicago, IL, USA CST

Proposal Name: Marble Weather Data Integration

Motivation for Proposal / Goal:

Weather data is freely available on the Internet through standard
formats like XML and RSS. This data can be culled together and used
mapped to geographic locations in Marble. Conditions like wind speed,
temperature, and severe weather could be displayed visually to the user,
much like what can be seen on a TV forecast.

This information can be of use to travelers looking at their
destinations, or people engaging in sports that rely on weather conditions.

Implementation Details:

I envision the interface for this feature to be similar to the current
“Legend” tab that's currently in Marble. Pieces of information can be
toggled on and off depending on what the user is interested in.

An option for general weather conditions would include the usual sun or
cloud icons, and basic information like high/low temperatures, and
chance of precipitation.

Wind speed would be displayed showing a simplified version of station
models (stick and notches). It may be more useful for a casual user to
show something like a windsock and a text label for speed.

Severe weather alerts are often issued across large areas, such as
counties in the US. Highlighting these areas may prove to be
non-trivial. In addition, sometimes more detailed information is
available, such as individual lightning strikes or earthquake
epicenters; this data can be represented in a similar manner to above.

Tentative Timeline:

    * Read code/documentation, implement skeleton plugin
      2 weeks – May 25to June 5

    * Selecting, downloading and parsing data sources
      4 weeks – June 8 to July 3

    * UI, drawing icons on the map
      4 weeks – July 6 to July 31

    * QA and polishing
      2 weeks – August 3 to August 14

Other Obligations:

My only other obligation this summer will continuing my part time
internship, working mornings. I should be able to put 25-30 hours each
week towards GSoC.

About Me:

I'm currently studying for a Master's in Computer Science at Illinois
Institute of Technology in Chicago, IL, where I got my undergraduate
degree. Some of my favorite areas include functional programming and
distributed systems. Linux has been my primary OS for the last 4 years.
I'm looking to start giving back to the OSS community. I've already
submitted a few patches for Kopete, and left to my own devices I'll
probably submit a few more.

Outside of school I'm fairly active. As an undergraduate I was active in
my fraternity and participated in several community service projects. I
also swam on the varsity team, and I've recently started playing Water
Polo with a local group. I've also been known to make my own maki sushi
rolls, and jump out of airplanes.*

*Torsten Rahn wrote:
> This was supposed to end up on marble-devel, but for whatever reason the big 
> hairy e-mail-deer didn't manage to deliver it ... 
>
> ----------  Forwarded Message  ----------
>
> Subject: GSoC: Weather Data
> Date: Saturday 21 March 2009
> From: "John T. Groszko" <grosjoh1 at iit.edu>
> To: rahn at kde.org
>
> Hello,
>
> I'm currently a Graduate Student in Computer Science at Illinois Tech in
> Chicago, IL. I've got experience with C++ and Qt, I've used them for a
> few school projects and I've also submitted a few patches to Kopete. I
> thought it'd be fun to participate in the Summer of Code and get a lot
> more experience participating in an open source project, particularly KDE.
>
> The weather data idea interested me because it's pulling a lot of
> different data sources together into useful information for the user. It
> appears that most of these proposals are in terms of use cases, and I
> foresee this feature being useful for not only simple weather forecasts
> for traveling, but even getting wind history/forecasts that would be
> useful for wind sports like kitesurfing or sailing.
>
> I guess I should work on a proposal in the next week or so. Some help
> input would be great!
>
> Thanks,
> John Groszko
>
>
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