In April we had a very cool day of meeting and presentations among the young scientists of the FOCUS group. We were looking at an easy way to share the international contacts among all the members, for example when one wants to do a research exchange abroad.
Yes, we could have created a database with all the information, and then all the members could have filled the database, but it might look strange but even if we work with a lot of data, we’re not too keen on playing with databases. That probably deserves a post.
Our database will be a single file containing a list of entries, each of them looking like
"OGS",
[45.710678, 13.762393],
"Arthur Capet",
"http://www.ogs.trieste.it/en/",
["Physical oceanography", "Modelling"]
pretty explicit. So if someone can provide a new contact, the basic things we need to know are:
I even think that the most tedious part could be related to the definition of the topics, because everybody has a different view on that, then in this prototype we use basic stuffs like “Physical oceanography”, “Remote sensing”, …
A simple Leaflet map where all the contacts are represented as a marker. Two filters are offered:
Leaflet.CountrySelect.js,Basically the usefulness of the tool will depend on the data providers, i.e. the scientists.
Once again, let’s be honest: isn’t it an overkill to have an interactive map instead of a shared google spreadsheet? I would say that the map can be used for other purposes, for example showing the distribution and the numbers of contacts at a glance.
In addition, the time required to create the map was rather short, hence it’s not a big risk if it is not used often.
Finally, for the markers one could use the institute logo,