Idea Board

This is a page to post random ideas you might have for the project, even if they have nothing to do with what we're working on at the moment.

Contents

1. Funding iNaturalist Beyond School
2. iNaturalist Big Day at Berkeley
3. Making Data Entry Fun
4. Site Design
5. NLP for species name recognition

Funding iNaturalist Beyond School

• Google Grants
• Ideas @ Berkeley

iNaturalist Big Day at Berkeley

One cool way to get the word out about iNat might be to organize a Big Day for the Berkeley campus. People from the UCB campus community could form teams and compete to see which team can observe the most species in a 24 hours period on the Berkeley campus. We could have each team log its observations in iNat, and maybe put together some special Big Day tools, as one of our interviewees suggested. Such a competition could also be used to erode some of the Balkanization on campus: maybe each team could have no more than one member from each department.

Making Data Entry Fun

Data entry isn't exactly the most awesome thing ever. How can we make it fun?

• Implement Big Day/Year tools (Interviewee #4)
• Compete for most positive IDs in help forum (Nate)
• "First!" badges, like "First to see a Harlequin Duck in San Francisco!" (Ken-ichi, via Yelp)
• "Freaking amazing find!" badge (Nate)

Site Design

Here are some old mockups I made a while back (Ken-ichi).

Main Page

Note the use of Audubon's swallow-tailed kite painting might be unkosher.

Journal Entry

Kind of influenced by an early inclination toward Drupal

NLP for species name recognition

One function that could be necessary for this project is recognizing where in natural language text a user is talking about a biological entity. For instance, instead of hunting through a taxonomy or a list of pictures keyed by color to find a particular species, it might be a better to just type in "bluebird." Bluebird could be entered multiple ways ("blue bird", "blue bird," "Western Blue Bird," "Sialia mexicana"), and it might not even refer to a particular species, as in "I saw a blue bird out of the corner of my eye but it was gone before I could get my binoculars on it." Scientific name recognition might be as easy as language recognition using character adjacency. Part-of-speech analysis could pick out the bluebirds form the birds that are blue.