Leveraging Domain Repositories in Flyover Country, a Mobile App for Geoscience Outreach, Data Discovery and Visualization

This project will continue to develop a mobile app, Flyover Country (FC), that will bring information about relevant points of interest (POI) and map data to the user while flying, and also driving or hiking, without the need for in-flight Wi-Fi, by downloading a strip of data based on the flightpath before the user boards the plane. GPS (Global Positioning System), which functions in airplane mode, allows precise flight tracking, making prompts for POI viewing timely and relevant. With around 4.5 million people flying every day, the potential audience for FC is huge, as is its potential for geoscience outreach. The app will directly feed high-quality geoscience information to the user at the very point when curiosity is stimulated, and could thus improve public science literacy as well as inspiring and supporting the development of a generation of geoscientists. FC could also readily be adapted for use in STEM education, and will be structured so as to provide a platform for the exposure of all types of geospatial geoscience data, forming new infrastructure for education and research.

Flyover Country (FC) is an open-source Android and iOS mobile application for geoscience outreach and education. Its key features are (1) delimitation of an area of interest to a traveler (e.g., a flight path, driving route, or hiking trail); (2) selection of georeferenced data within the delimited area via API calls to data repositories; (3) caching of these datasets on the user?s smartphone local storage; (4) exposure and promotion of points of interest (POI) by a location-aware service as the user approaches the POI. Work proposed here extends FC?s functionality to the geoscience research community as a data discovery tool that can be readily used in the field to instantly and dynamically provide context to new measurements. Novel visualization strategies for stratigraphic and multivariate data, as well as authorship and provenance networks, will further enhance researcher efficiency.