Project Summary
This project aims to improve the user interface and design of the client’s Litter Map website, as well as implement an algorithm to predict potential litter locations using geographical tags and display that information on a heat map overlay.
Project Description
The clients for this project are Daniel Toben, founder of The Earth Stewards, a company which is encouraging people from all over the world to report and clean up litter in their local communities, and Ildar Sagdejev, a freelance developer who is working on the technical aspects of The Earth Stewards.
The clients have created an starting website called “Litter Map” that is primarily targeted towards litter reporters, litter cleaners, and local governments. The site allows users to mark locations on a map where they have found litter, view locations where others have reported litter, mark areas as cleaned, and create an account keep track of their reports and clean-ups. Additionally, the website will inform the proper local government about litter reports in their area, and have a separate page for administrators to keep track of sitewide metrics.
The primary goal of our project is to improve the user-friendliness and navigability of the website and related web applications, as well as implement an algorithm to predict and display potential litter locations on a heat map that is accessible to the users. The algorithm will look at a database of geographical tags from the “Open Street Map” website and use the number of litter-associated tags in an area to predict the likelihood of litter appearing in that area.
The successful completion of these functionalities would significantly improve the logistics of litter clean-up, as users could determine likely clean-up locations without having to wait for another user to report a location, which could take a long time if the area is remote.
These features would also make the site more popular and help the litter clean-up community. Currently, there are few platforms where individuals and organizations dedicated to cleaning up the environment can communicate and work with each other. This site could serve as a place for the members of the community to gather, and the predictive map could encourage others to take initiative and clean litter before it has been reported.