CS 8803 Project Proposal
GT ComET- Georgia Tech Comet Event
Tracker
Akshata Gangolli, Neha Kharsikar, Rohan Soman, Vasudev Prabhu
1. Motivation and Objectives
Remember, when your friend last told you about an event he attended, which had its food stall as one of the
best attractions :-)!! Well more importantly an event where they were accepting resumes for prospective
student candidates to work with them over the summer! And you wondered, had anyone informed you about it
in prior you would have had a chance to attend it for the great food it had to offer, to interact and build your
network, as also benefit from the great knowledge sharing that such events facilitate.
Well, precisely this is what motivated us in coming up with a Real Time Event Tracker.
=> The Georgia Tech Comet Event Tracker.
There is so much to an event:
- Time
- Venue
- Details like the presenter and the topic
- Registration for prospective employees
- Other attractions like food stalls, raffle prizes
And you don’t want to keep track of all this, all the time, from your busy schedule.
The GT ComET incorporates all these needs to provide a real time event tracking system.
The objectives of the system are:
•
Making event tracking simpler for the user, by providing a UI that facilitates what exactly the user is
interested in:
- typically this is the topic of the event
- the take-aways / offerings at the event
- the location and time of the event
•
The system provides this by allowing the users to tag the events in their own desired manner, which
is most intuitive to them.
•
It provides a map based presentation of the events to easily convey the venue of the event.
•
The events can be added to personal iCals / vCals if that’s the best way for the users to keep track of
their own events.
•
The reason for choosing the underlying technology of Comet for the system lies in delivering real time
events to the user. Further the users are provided with an instant messenger / shoutbox service so
that they can collaborate in real time with one another and plan for the events / comment over the
events and go ahead.
2. Related Work
One of the most prominent application, similar to GT ComET is Flickrvision [1] created by David Troy.
Flickrvision merges Flickr with Google Maps and hence displays the real-time geo-tagged photos as they are
uploaded by the user. Twittervision [2], has the same idea however this time it has to do with tweets
(postings) from Twitter.com. Twitter entries are limited to 140 characters, describe what people around the
globe are doing and are visualized on Google Maps. Spintv [3], does a similar visualization of geo-tagged
YouTube videos. A similar Wikipedia based application, WikipediaVision [4], has combined Google Maps with
live data on updates from the English Wikipedia to display the geolocation of people editing articles in near
real-time. The map rapidly pans back and forth across the world, pinpointing the locations of users who have
just edited an article, and displaying the name of the article and its hyperlink.
Comet, one of the major technologies that we propose to use, came into the picture in the year 2000 and has
had its niche in financial trading markets due to the need of real-time data, although it was not called so till
2007. A number of companies such as KnowNow and Networks attempted to build Comet servers. However,
Comet gained popularity in 2005 with the release of Google’s Gmail chat [5], JotSpot’s collaborative
document editing tool, Renkoo’s Comet-based chat etc.
We believe that this technology can benefit the event tracking and the chat application, as both will send realtime data that needs to be captured.
3. Proposed Work
The System Overview:
We propose to build a system, Georgia Tech Comet Event Tracker (GT ComET) that displays the events that
will be taking place on campus at different venues as location-based pop-ups on a Georgia Tech map. The
system will make a note to keep a track of all the events that are posted by various departments, colleges,
groups etc. This will be taken care of in two different ways –
•
Event Form: GT ComET will have an event form which will facilitate adding of events into the GT
ComET system as and when the event is scheduled and announced.
•
Event Tracker/ Parser: This module will keep track of changes that occur on the events pages of
various departments, groups, colleges etc. As soon as the tracker senses a new event it will add the
event to the database.
The Functionalities:
•
Events:
The displaying of the events itself will be an important feature of the application. An event will consists
of many attributes viz. venue, time, type, subject, host etc. The key would be display the information
on the user interface without cluttering up the space.
•
Event Map:
The events will be displayed in a map-based user interface which will be very convenient for the user
to locate the venue of the event.
•
Event Filters:
Users will be provided with a facility to filter the events based on the date, location, department etc.
This will enable them to focus on events of interest rather than cluttering up the space with events.
•
User defined tags:
User tagging is vastly superior compared to pre-defined tagging because it is the users who are
navigating and trying to find the stuff. The way they describe it is the same way they will try to find it.
And it's really hard for us to figure out all the keywords up front.
The user will be able to assign each event with tags facilitating him to filter the events based on his
own tags. Thus, an event providing refreshments can be labeled as “Food”.
•
Chat module/Shoutbox:
A chat module/shoutbox will be provided along with the event map to enable them to exchange
information regarding the events.
•
iCal/vCal
The users can optionally save the events on their calendar.
The Architecture:
The proposed architecture of the system is as shown below:
•
The client browser accessing the GT ComET webpage makes a request to the GT ComET web
service.
•
The Event Tracker gets data from the various event pages of various colleges, departments, groups
etc. Alternatively, the events can also be entered into the event page.
•
These events data are stored in the GT ComET database with all the attributes of the event.
•
The GT ComET web service integrates the data from the database and the chat/ shout box module
and serves it to the clients.
4. Plan of action
Hardware Resources:
•
One machine for the server application to run.
•
At least 3-4 machines for performance evaluation.
Software Resources:
We intend to use the following for the implementation of the project
•
Server implementation – PHP / Python, open source server implementation prototype
•
MySQL database
•
Microsoft MapPoint - Map service for displaying events at appropriate points on the GT map
•
Chat /Shout Box module
•
Platform: MS Windows XP
Sr. No.
Date
1
Feb 22
2
Feb 29
Milestone
•
Study of PHP/Python
•
Study of map service to be used
•
Installation of an existing server application code
and understanding of the source code.
3
March 8
4
March 15
5
March 22
Client side GUI development with chat module integration
6
March 29
and filtering features
7
April 7
8
April 14
Implementing the server code
•
Acquiring event data for performance evaluation
•
Performance evaluation of the application
Analyzing the results of the evaluation and work on
project report
9
April 21
Final Project Demo
5. Evaluation and Testing method:
•
The deliverables in this project would be the source code of the Comet server along with a functional
web based user interface for the users to keep track of events happening in the GT campus. The user
interface will give real time updates of the events happening around campus. These updates will
appear as small pop-ups over the buildings where the actual event would take place.
•
The server will be evaluated for its performance under load i.e. we’ll check how the server handles
open connections to multiple clients and whether this affects the response time of the server.
•
The tagging feature should be able to provide a good filtering technique to the user. The duration for
which the pop-ups will be displayed should be long enough for the user to read the messages.
•
The feature of personalization for the users will be considered based on the evaluation.
6. Bibliography
1. Flickrvision : http://www.flickrvision.com/
2. Twittervision: http://www.twittervision.com/
3. Spint TV: http://www.spintv.tv/
4. WikipediaVision: http://www.lkozma.net/wpv/
5. Comet: http://alex.dojotoolkit.org/?p=545
6. http://cometdaily.com/2007/10/19/comet-and-push-technology/