Thursday, January 31, 2008

What's in a name?

Today was a fairly uneventful day so far as the project. I contacted my supervisor regarding the kind of resources that we have available and he put me in touch with Ross Turner who is a PhD student at the University. Seemingly he's done a lot of work with GPS including a project called `Roadsafe`, so hopefully he has a lot of information that I can put to good use. I'm still waiting to hear back from him.

Software wise the Eclipse Java IDE has been installed and configured to make use of Tortoise SVN for version control. This will make things easier when I realise that I'm marching swiftly down a blind alley and need to retrace my steps in order to proceed in a more `correct` fashion.

The project is to be called `Little Brother` in a nod to George Orwell's 1984. I find the whole tracking people through GPS a little scary - particularly as we're writing stories about the things they get up to...

In the beginning...

One of our lecturers has suggested that we write a blog to record our thoughts and activities during our final year project. Doing it this way will mean that I don't have to continually fill in forms detailing what I've done. I'll also have someone to blame if there's a disk failure somewhere and all my work goes to hell.

So, a bit of background on the project. This week has been mainly filled with meetings while we try and decide who is going to do what and what is to be done. The foundations of the project was always going to be GPS and analysing the data provided by it; the main task being to decide what to do with it once it had been analysed. The two ideas were to either relate the information to a map or to produce a story based on where the tracking device had been during the day (given that I'll probably be tracking students the majority of entries will probably relate to The Bobbin - a well loved pub just off of campus). At the time of writing it is likely that I will be using some Natural Language Generation to compose the stories which can later be edited to a limited extent by the end user.

The project ideas have to be finalised (....or our supervisor would like them finalised by Monday) so I guess that's when the bulk of the work will begin. Now then... where do I start...