Thursday, March 18, 2010

Science Pipes Contest

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned on the eBird Tech Talk forum that we are continuing to open up the ability for people to interact with the eBird database. As some of our most passionate users, we are making a announcement of an eBird Science Pipes contest first at Chip Notes and in eBird Tech Talk. We invite you to participate in the first ever Science Pipes eBird contest. We've conjured up this contest as a way to introduce the eBird community to Science Pipes. "What's Science Pipes" you ask? It's a way for you to play with and visualize eBird data by creating a "pipe" that defines the visualization. Look for an official an announcement on eBird sometime next week, but in the meantime, find out more on the Science Pipes web page.

http://info.sciencepipes.org/help/2010/03/spring-ebird-contest.html

4 comments:

  1. This is the web. Why not make your URL an actual link so we can click on it instead of cut/paste?

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  2. Its pretty good, but working on it for a bit longer could make it a lot better. For example, a lack of hotkeys for even things like deleting and scrolling the screen make it very difficult to use. The arrows between pieces often overlap other pieces and each other, making it hard to understand. Also, it seems like the date range option is essentially useless because it seem you can't make a graph display anything other than the full year of dates. After you run it, it should take you to the results page, not to the list of pipes. So its a good idea, but a few things make it far too frustrating to use.

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  3. I've spent some time playing around with the Science Pipes. It's a great start and I'm excited about the possibilities. Being a user of tools like Crystal reports, I tend to think in terms of how the models for that class of reporting tools, so it's been a little frustrating bumping into some of the current limitations the Science Pipes beta version. I'd like to see some additional "operations" components for summing the data. Also, the pie chart component seems buggy and quite limited at present. I'm hoping the team keeps pumping out frequent improvements like eBird.org has. Keep up the good work!

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  4. Maybe I'm missing something big, but besides the observer and protocol filters, there doesn't seem to be much you can do with this that you can't already do with "View and Explore Data" in eBird.

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