IS480 Team wiki: 2011T1 TheTalkies
Contents
The Talkies Team Members and Roles
No | MEMBER | ROLE | RESPONSIBILIIES |
1 | Aung Myint Thein [1] | Project Manager / 3D model designer |
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2 | Soe Thet Aung [2] | System Administrator / System Architect |
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3 | Khaing Pwint Wah [3] | Lead Tester/ Quality Assurance |
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4 | Kyaw Moe Hein [4] | Lead Designer / 3D model designer / GermaniumWeb developer |
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5 | Thandar Tun [5] | Database Administrator |
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6 | Phyo Wint Wint Tun [6] | Lead Developer |
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- Besides the above mentioned roles, each team member will be developer too. This is to make sure that each member will get chance to expose to the programming with Twitter API.
Supervisor
Prof Archan Misra
The main responsibilities of supervisor are as following.
- Meet with students weekly. If the team progressed very well with frequent demo and good sponsor feedback, the supervisor can decide to meet fortnightly. During the meetings, provide guidance, feedback and supervision. The teams should manage their own project but when there are problems or issues, the supervisor should step in. For example, the students are working on social networking but have no idea who or where to get help. The supervisor can direct the team to relevant faculty, books, articles, etc. If the team is facing a problem with the sponsor, the supervisor can approach the sponsor on behalf of the team.
- Meet teams with sponsor (as required). This is best accomplished during student presentation as described in the grading page. This opportunity is important to get requirements clarity from the sponsor.
- Ensure that the project meets the course objective.
- Grade the team according to the grading page and feedback the grades to the team. This include reviewing other teams to compare team projects. Supervisors are responsible for individual team member grades.
- Review and vet the poster for printing.
Project Overview
Project Description
Creating a fully customized social media dashboard on simplified 3D model of Singapore Management University categorizing tweets based on location and trending topics.
Motivation
Specific Location
SMU students and faculty members are sharing their thoughts and things happening around them by using various social media tools. Among them, twitter is the most popular tools. Twitter offers a social networking and microblogging service enabling its users to send and read messages called tweets. If I want to see someone's tweets with real time updates, I have to "follow" them. "Following" is one-way-adding-friend method and the other side doesn't need to accept my following. Although twitter is pretty popular among students and faculty members, "following" has a very subtle disadvantage. If another student or faculty is not following me, he will not see my tweets even if we are in the same campus. Similarly, if I didn't follow a student, I won't see his tweets even if we are in the same classroom. Do we really need to follow over thousands of students and professors to get tweets from SMU campus? No, we don't want and we should not. Is it the end of what the most popular modern social networking tool capable of?
No! We believe the social media can do better than this. Our social media dashboard will be customized to capture all the tweets in SMU campus and show them on simplified 3D model. Students can see what others think about a particular course or faculty. Faculty can see what is happening around university. All of them doesn't need to follow or explode their following people list just to see things happening around SMU.
Related Trends
Twitter has a very interesting feature called "trends". If users from Singapore tweet about a topic (for example #F1) to a certain amount of times, that keyword is promoted into "trends" and it was shown on the twitter page as Figure 1. However, students are not interested in those random topics or trends happening in whole Singapore. We are more interested in trends happening in SMU. Can we change the setting? No, we can only change the country level or worldwide. Therefore, trends such as #SIS will never appear in Singapore trends. That is not what students want from social media.
We will not only capture the tweets around SMU campus but we will also analyze them and develop trends only related to SMU. For example, when students are tweets about #Steve in matriculation, we will make #Steve as trends. Moreover, we will create a list of possible keywords and use them when we capture the tweets too. For example, #SMUSIS, #SMUSOE, etc. So, it will make trends in our page more relevant and related to SMU.
Combining the specific localized tweets and relevant trends, our website will be one stop dashboard for students and faculty members to stay connect with people around them. Potential students can also see the culture and interaction of current students. Last but not least, the expertise from community can discuss and contribute to the trends and topics in SMU as well. All of them don't need to follow anyone. All the tweets in our web site are specifically localized for SMU and the trends are highly relevant and related to SMU as well.
Project Scope
Main Features
There are 3 main features in our application.
- It is boring to look at the text only pages. We believe creating 3D model of SMU and showing tweets on the 3D model is much more fun and more meaningful for us. With the limitation of the time and resource, we won't be able to create detailed model of SMU. Moreover, why don't we create more fun-type 3D model to reflect the friendliness of the application? This is our very first feature: Creating simplified yet fun 3D model of SMU.
- We realized that only showing tweets doesn't complete the twitter experience. After we got the tweets based on the location and the pre-defined keywords, we are going to process them and show the trending topics around SMU. This will definitely facilitate the discussion and interaction among our application users mainly students. So, this is our second feature: Trending page.
- In and around SMU, students lost all sort of things including but not limited to pen, mp3 player, and student card most importantly. We can report to lost and found at each school building and library. Do I need to walk to all buildings? Yes. Do they consolidate the reports? I highly doubt No. So, there are multiple reports of lost and multiple reports of found. We can see that it is not a perfect system, at least not good enough. User can tweet about the lost and found with #LostNFound hashtag. We will show it in our permanent Lost and Found Trend page. Isn't it cool? This is our third main feature: Lost and Found Trend Page.
Components
There are 7 components that will make our 3 main features complete. The visualization [to be updated later] of those 7 components is provided in the image below and description of each component is explained in the following table.
No | Component | Description | Specification |
1 | 3D model |
We are going to build a simplified 3D model of Singapore Management University on which we will show the tweets and the trending topics. It won't show the exact classroom and seminar room location because of the sensitivity of the data and time limit of the project. However, it will have the same level and shape as the real building. We promise when you see the model, you will notice which building it is. |
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2 | Location Search |
Using twitter API of searching tweets only around the campus, we will pull only the relevant tweets for our website. So, we will get all the tweets from students, faculty, and even community if they are tweeting in the campus and they enabled the geo-tagged feature. |
We will get the tweets from the area of circle with 0.5km radius centre point at the School of Information Systems. |
3 | # Search (hashtag keyword searching) |
To complement location search, we will also search tweets on pre-assigned keywords. We are going to list possible keywords in SMU campus as much as possible. By doing so, our application will not need to sacrifice for non-geo-tagged tweets. |
Keywords: predefined keywords |
4 | Trending Page |
When a user selects a #keyword, we will show the page with tweets with the selected keyword. When a user selects a faculty name, we will show the page with tweets which are located around the selected faculty and the tweets with related keywords. For example, when a user selects SIS faculty, the page will show all tweets located around SIS and with keywords IS480. |
Frequency of pulling tweets: 15mins Time to become trend: 24hrs Result tweets for a trend: as much as possible in 7 days (Twitter API limitation) |
5 | Lost & Found Trend Page |
In every trending page, there will be #LostNFound keyword and we will keep it permanent regardless of the selected faculty and keyword. We want to make students life easier by just tweeting when they lost or found some valuables. Users can also search the tweets based on the time. It won't be a problem if I want to search the tweets about #LostNFound for last Friday. This can be one stop lost and found portal powered by social media technology. |
Timeline slider maximum: 7days |
6 | Tweet |
Users with twitter credentials can log in, tweet and discuss on every above mentioned pages. When a user tweets on the keyword page, the keyword will be automatically added at the end of the tweet. Users without twitter credentials will not be left out. They can tweet and discuss in the trending page just by filling nickname field. His tweets will not be broadcasted to twitter page but users can see those tweets through our application. |
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7 | Statistics |
We will keep the statistics such as number of tweets for each keywords so that we can show the weekly or monthly popular trends. |
Show Case
Our application can be accessed at http://3dsocializer.phpfogapp.com/index.php . Although we are not completed yet, we are very proud to show case our efforts and what we have done so far. Please comment at below if you have any thoughts.
System Overview
Database
To be updated.
3D Modelling
System Architecture
To be updated.
Resources and references
- Web space hosting (phpfog)
- Version control system (Git) – provided by client
- Development tools (Notepad++, Eclipse) – free and open-sourced
- 3D Modeling tools (Germanium 3D, 3D Max 2010) – provided by client and student licence
- 3D Max 2010
- Germanium Building Composer
- Bug tracker – free and open-sourced
- Twitter API – online sources
- PHP
- MySQL
Project Management
Project Milestones
Iteration No | Feature to be implemented | Status |
1 |
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Completed |
2 |
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Completed |
3 |
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Completed(Delayed) |
4 |
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Completed(Delayed) |
5 |
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Completed |
6 |
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Completed |
7 |
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Current |
8 |
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- Our detailed planning and schedules are available here.
- We have exported the slides that we used for Acceptance Presentation to PDF and it is available here.
- We have exported the slides that we used for Mid-term Presentation to PDF and it is available here.
- Our mid term wiki is available here. This is the snapshot of mid-term state mainly highlights of changes and things that we have done after the acceptance presentation.
- Our final wiki is available here. This is the highlights of changes and things that we have done after the mid-term presentation.
Risk and Mitigation plan
No | Risk | Likelihood of Occurrence | Impact on Project | Mitigation Strategy |
1. | Schedule Risk | |||
1.1 Underestimation of a task or an iteration | Medium | High |
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1.2 Timetable conflict | High | Medium |
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2. | Specification Breakdown Risk | |||
2.1 Incomplete Requirement Specifications or changes of requirement specifications by client | Low | High |
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3. | Technical Risk | |||
3.1 Unfamiliarity with twitter and Germanium 3d APIs | Medium | Medium |
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3.2 Integration difficulties with Germanium and twitter | Medium | High |
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3.3 External server down | Low | High |
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4. | Resource Risk | |||
4.1 One member have to drop the course if the team do not get at least A- for acceptance presentation since he is doing FYP as IS 481 | Medium | High |
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4.2 Computers crashing | High | High |
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Learning outcomes
No | Learning Outcomes | Learning Potential | Actions to Achieve the Outcomes |
1. | Integration of business & technology in a sector context | ||
1.1 Business IT value linkage skills | YY |
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2. | IT architecture, design and development skills | ||
2.1 System requirements specification skills | YY |
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2.2 Software and IT architecture analysis and design skills | YY |
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2.3 Implementation skills | YY |
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2.4 Technology Application Skills | YY |
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3. | Project management skills | ||
3.1 Scope management skills | YY |
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3.2 Risks management skills | YY |
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3.3 Project integration and time management skills | YY |
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3.4 Configuration management skills | YY |
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3.5 Quality management skills | YY |
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4. | Learning to learn skills | ||
4.1 Search skills | YY |
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4.2 Skills for developing a methodology for learning | YY |
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5. | Collaboration (or team) skills | ||
5.1 Team work skills | YY |
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6. | Communication skills | ||
6.1 Presentation skills | YY |
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6.2 Writing skills | Y |
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