Tracker by SCoRe Lab

Tracker is a product of SCoRE(The Sustainable Computing Research Group) which helps developers to kick start developing mobility tracking applications by letting GPS devices to post their locations to a nodejs server through a REST service.

General Information

Tracker ( or the Mobility Tracker ) is a project to build a core of a real-time vehicle tracking system which can be extended by other vehicle tracking systems. This system could be extended to track trains, trucks, taxis, etc.

The primary component of the system are know as trackers. A device with a GPS unit will be registered on the system and they will send their locations to the system periodically. These devices are identified in the system as Trackers. This system also comprises of resources which are used to easily identify trackers. You could think of a resource as a type of a tracker. A tracker will inherit the features of the bound resource.

This system consists of an Admin interface as well as a public interface. Administrative tasks such as assigning IDs to trackers will be done through the admin interface while the general functions such as showing details of trackers on a map will be the function of the public interface.

The current implementation of the User Interface is a very simple one with the most basic requirements. We hope to improve the user interface for achieving better usability, engagement and performance.

Main Pages

There are 4 main sections of the web interface. Given below is a brief explanation of each. 

Managers Dashboard - Allows tracker managers to view trackers, their paths and other related details on a map. Links to create tracker page and create resource page are also available. Links to any other pages(future pages) will also be available from this main dashboard. A mock-up of this is shown below.

Create Resource Page - This page will allow tracker managers to register new resources by providing details such as, Product name, marker, icon, resource category etc. An anticipated implementation of create user page/popup is shown below. 

Create Tracker Page - This will be quite similar to the create resource page, except that the fields will be different. Also a binding resource should be selected. Shown here is a mockup of that.

Tracker Details Page - This page will use charts such as line charts, pie charts and map marker diagrams to show details and compare trackers. This is not yet available at the current implementation. A mockup of the idea is as follows,

Other than the explained above, there will be pages to signup and signin, edit details, confirmation dialogs, user profile editing etc. 


Anticipated Features
Following are the anticipated features which will be implemented giving priority to most important ones.

1. "Search" - Allows searching trackers and/or resources or any notes with the given keyword. For example, tracker-X can have a description saying that it is owned by a the government. Then searching with the keyword "government" will provide a result set which includes tracker-X.
2. "Filter Trackers" - Allow showing only a selected set of trackers based on some specified property(eg- Tracker Type). For example, each tracker is bound to some resource. Assume that there is a resource called resource-A. Then the tracker manager might want to see details about the trackers associated with resource-A.
3. "Visualize tracker variables" - Visualize information such as speed and direction on the map. For instance, We can convert the existing general google map into a map diagram on which bubbles depict trackers. The color of the bubble will show the direction of the tracker while the size of the bubble will show the speed of the tracker at that moment. 
4. Multiple Trackers on the Map display - At the existing implementation, path analysis can be done only for one selected tracker. The anticipated new feature is to show multiple trackers differentiated by the path color associated with it.
5. "User Management" - Allows users(tracker managers) to register, maintain and customize a personal profile. At the moment, there is no mechanism to create profiles or signin. 
6. "Tracker Details Page" - Basic information about trackers will be shown under this section. This could be done using textual descriptions or by using charts to visualize some attribute of the tracker. For example, a user may want to know how the speed of a tracker changed with time. This can be easily understood if a line chart is used. 
7. "Tracker comparison" - We can use some attribute as the basis to compare two or more trackers. For example, we could use a pie chart to visualize the speed of trackers at a given instance.
8. "Notification System" - Users will be notified about the status of their actions on the User Interface. Also error messages, confirmation dialogs, informative dialogs will be implemented along with this system. 
9. "Tracker-Resource Relation" - A better implementation to build and maintain tracker-resource relationship. For example, a user may want to list the trackers associated with a resource, change and edit the relationships and so on.