a little something

Sometime ago , I was thinking about the project we did in the final year of college. I have thought about it many times since its completion . We got good score for the project in the college evaluation. Every time I think about it, I wonder what it was about. I don't want to go near the scores. The scores are always an uneasy topic to think about and reason.I just want to remeber that I had a good score.I don't want to think "why?" .Because, if I think about the scores, Most of the times, I hardly find any justification. So I don't think. But, It just feels good.

We named it "Weather representation analysis using maps and charts". Seeing this name would probably evoke some interest and some expectations. To a person who has never seen this project, it would be something like a weather station with lots of real time data coming in and some images similar to satellite images , on screen, with all this data represented with ,or on these images and maps. Then, about the analysis part, it may have been some form of prediction of the trends of weather and also the forecasting of the weather conditions based on the data available. These may have been the expectations on the scope of this applications the name given by us would have warranted.Now I got to explain about what it really was..

Initially,the scope of this project was only to deal with the different ways in which the weather data can be effectively represeted in various forms ,so that the user can dig in and find out the required information from a form of his choice. Given this scope, we were true to this scope and we did represent the data in some pretty good forms ,like a bar chart/line chart representing the trends of the various weather parameters and also on the maps, which show the appropriate diagrams over the various states (. . we confined to india..), based on some calculations of the weather parameters.So, how did we get this weather data. We got this data from another system ,by using webservices. This , I confess , isn't real time data. We provided a form that would allow the entry of the various weather parameters and this data is transmitted to the other system where the applications is supposed to be running. The former system is like a thin client , where this form for data entry would be found. I again confess, that this wasn't so. We were running the whole application on both the systems. So , the idea was, the systems with these thin clients would be at various locations( various states in india) and the data received at the central system would be used for the representation. So , the representation was ok..( atleast for us.. then..) . So for analysis.. we go..

In this part, we tried to use the data to present some new information. For example , there was a form representing the high and low pressure areas which are more likely to be hit by cyclones and windstorms in the near future. This , we did by checking the weather parameters for a region against the weather of the neighboring regions and then presenting the conclusions as suitable representations on the map. The central system, after receiving this data, could send some alerts to the remote locations if there is any windstorm or cyclone that is likely to hit that location.So this is about the analysis. We also used some APIs to design a feed reader for reading the feeds that we generate in an XML file. As far as the prediction goes, we used a very basic algorithm to predict the weather. This was it.

The conclusion is, the project wasn't ground breaking stuff. It wasn't born out of passion or many years of vision or contemplation of weather representation. It was an attempt to fit in what we knew , what we could do and what we could learn, into a box called time. It didn't give me a great internship or a great job or a scholarship to some elite institute.What it did give was a decent result in line with our anticipation and some happiness.