UFO-IO contains the largest, most comprehensive dataset of UFO sightings in existence, and lets users explores the data in a whole new context. In the main chart view, UFO-IO presents a month-by-month breakdown of every reported UFO sighting from 1981-2012. Users can choose to view the details of a month's reports, and view all the results on a map as well. UFO-IO's timeline lays out an array of space-related world events, astronomical phenomena, and alien/UFO-related movies, allowing for some real-world context for UFO sighting trends around the time the world was exposed to these events.
Finally, to make fetching the data easier we have programmed an API which we have made publicly available.
Ryan Baker - D3, jQuery, CSS, Overall Layout Design Ashley DeSouza - D3, jQuery, CSS, Google Maps Tom Quast - D3, Scraped the Data, Built the Database, wrote the API Victor Starostenko - D3, jQuery, CSS, Graphic Design, Data Acquisition
jQuery, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL, d3.js, Google Maps API, Mapquest Geolocation API
- The dataset we scraped is dirty, all data is entered through text-fields, so was no validation is done. This led to a number of challenges, especially when trying to locate the cities. We used Mapquests best guess for the data, it returned something for >99,9 of the cases, but it might be off.
- If the user clicks on several timeline items in succession, the code which highlights the corresponding svg bar and places the marker does not work for some reason. Upon page refresh it begins working again.
- In Safari, the page does not display centered in the browser.
UFO sighting data obtained from uforc.org