One of the Google Summer of Code 2015 projects offered by 52°North is “Social Driving Stats”. It is a sub project related to 52°North’s enviroCar project. I will be working on this project under the mentoring of Dr.Christoph Stasch and Matthes Rieke. enviroCar offers a citizen science platform for collecting, analyzing, sharing and discussing car sensor data. Sharing specific tracks or statistics is currently not possible with enviroCar. The Social Driving Stats project aims to enhance the enviroCar with sharing facilities and social media links by implementing a REST interface for creating and providing track visualizations and statistics. Furthermore, enviroCar should be linked to social networks, such as Google Plus, Facebook or Twitter. Therefore, this project will utilize the APIs of these platforms and integrate them within the user profile pages of enviroCar.

Sample Facebook post made via the sharing function

The project deals with the enviroCar server and the enviroCar web app as well. The two main parts of the project are stated below.

1. The back end component, which will be developed inside the enviroCar server, should provide a set of user statistics and visualizations (thumbnails, images to publish, track visualizations). The development of a mechanism to generate these images and thumbnails according to the user’s statistics and tracks is a mandatory part in this component.This is published as a REST service so that other components can consume it and get the relevant information needed to publish it on social media.
2. The second component is developed under the enviroCar-WWW project, which is enviroCar’s website. A mechanism to publish the user statistics and tracks should be developed using social media APIs. Publish buttons for several social networks will be provided at the end. This component will consume the data from the enviroCar server’s REST interface (back end component) and publish them to social networks in appropriate formats.

This enhancement will make the enviroCar website experience more attractive to the user.

About Me

I’m Heshitha Hettihewa, a final year undergraduate in the Faculty of Information Technology, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. I’m an expert in Java Web technologies and fond of PHP as well. You can follow my development work on my Github and the progress of the project in 52°North wiki.