Federating data sets for use in a map context

Abstract

The goal of this project is to federate data sets containing location information such that they can be used in a map context. There are numerous examples of these data sets around the MIT campus: asset data with the Property Office, equipment data with Facilities, ShuttleTrack data, student/staff contact information, and hazardous materials data. In addition, there are many objects around the MIT campus that are not kept in a database or formally maintained in any way, and we would like to capture these in our system as well. In order to do this, we must first create tools and methods for capturing these location-based data sets, enabling us to bring the data into our system in a structured manner. Once we have this data "federated", we can use the interactive map infrastructure we have developed to create visualizations. These visualizations can range in complexity, from simple one data set visualizations, to visualizations of multiple related data sets. Furthermore, we would like to generalize these visualizations such that little or no manual tweaking is necessary for any federated data set. This would allow a data administrator to easily create a customized visualization for his/her federated data set. We will provide the functionality for federating and visualizing data sets in an API. This will help streamline and automate the integration process, and will allow this system to be easily expanded.