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BirdWatch - A Bird Sighting Progressive Web Application

ℹ️ Psst! BirdWatch is currently hosted live with a hosted MongoDB database! Check it out here!

BirdWatch is a progressive web application for bird watchers to record and view bird sightings, as well as to help with bird identification. The application allows users to add new sightings, view a sorted list of all sightings, and comment on identification suggestions.

BirdWatch is developed for an assignment as part of COM3504: The Intelligent Web Spring Semester 2022/2023 taught by The University of Sheffield. It is worked on by:

Features

The application includes the following features:

  • Adding new bird sightings, including the date and time seen, location, description, and identification
  • Viewing a sorted list of all bird sightings, sorted by date/time seen and identification status
  • Commenting on each sighting via a live chat function that is saved online
  • Linking identifications to information obtained from the DBPedia knowledge graph, including common name/scientific name, English description, and a URI linking to the DBPedia page describing the bird
  • Offline functionality with background sync for adding sightings, comments or identification of sightings

Getting Started

To run the application locally, follow these steps:

  1. Ensure you have Node.js and MongoDB installed on your machine
  2. Ensure MongoDB is running on your machine. More instructions can be found to run MongoDB on your platform can be found here
  3. Clone the repository to your machine: git clone https://github.com/Josephaedan/BirdWatch.git
  4. Install dependencies in the root directory: npm install
  5. BirdWatch uses environment variables to function which allows for customisation of the port that the server will run on, and the mongoDB server to connect to. This is done using a .env file to set the environment variables. Create a '.env' file in the root directory of the project and set the environment variables you would like to use. An example file '.env.example' has been provided for you to use as a template. The .env file should have a PORT, MONGO_PORT and MONGO_URL.
  6. Start the server: npm run start
  7. Open the application in your web browser at http://localhost:<PORT>. By default, the application will run on port 3000 and the MongoDB instance will run on port 27017. If you wish to change this, you can do so by setting the PORT environment variable before starting the server.

Dependencies

The application uses the following dependencies:

  • MongoDB: a document database that stores data in flexible, JSON-like documents
  • Express: a fast and minimalist web framework for Node.js
  • Mongoose: a MongoDB object modeling tool designed to work in an asynchronous environment
  • EJS: a simple templating language that lets you generate HTML markup with plain JavaScript
  • DBPedia Spotlight: a RESTful Web service that allows users to annotate text against a large, multilingual Wikipedia-based knowledge graph
  • Bootstrap: a free and open-source CSS framework directed at responsive, mobile-first front-end web development
  • Leaflet: an open-source JavaScript library for mobile-friendly interactive maps
  • OpenStreetMap: a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.