LUKE MAZZA

Experienced UI/UX designer with a passion for crafting highly-intuitive and accessible interactions that address the needs of users in innovative ways.

 

Northeast Cave GeoDB

 

The Northeastern Cave GeoDB is a work-in-progress repository of spatial and other data designed to serve the needs of the project-caving and cave-science community in the northeastern US. This is a passion project that sprang from the need to unite many disparate sources of data, from both digital and formerly analog, and combine them in one modern, mobile-first, easy to use web application. The goal is to accelerate the quality and rate of field data collection as well as knowledge-sharing between caving community members, leading to new discoveries and insights.

Software stack: Angular, Ionic, Node.js, and PostgreSQL + PostGIS.

Features

Wiki-like entries

This project was envisioned as a marriage of mapping tools, a fully-enabled geospatial database, and Wikipedia-like entries representing geographical points of interest. Editing and versioning allow for transparent collaboration between members.

Rich datasets

The most powerful resource to be leveraged is in combining existing datasets, which when layered start to form new insights into geological and hydrological relationships. At the present time the following are available, with more to come:

  • Cave and other karst features (points)

  • Flow routes (linestrings)

  • Hill-shaded Lidar (raster tilesets)

  • Tax parcels (shape files and metadata)

  • Geological units (shapefiles)

  • Cave map overlays (raster overlays)

Hybrid Mobile App

Being built on Ionic allows the app to be published to multiple platforms, with native-like UI controls, from a single Angular code base. This framework has its challenges and limitations, but for a small project team (me) looking to target a wide variety of platforms it seems to have been a good choice so far.