The following was acomplished this week:
- Further progress on design of front end webpage with implementation of dynamic event calendar
- Added front-end JSON parsing capabilities. The front end can request a JSON of events, parse the events, and load them into the calendar on a page load. Thus, we simply need a backend with a database of events to send to the frontend upon a valid XML request, and we are in excellent shape.
- Starting thinking about natural language processing methods for e-mail data scraping. Namely, how to determine if an event has free food and how to find the location, date, and time of the event. We have begun compiling a list of e-mail that have these characteristics to start looking for patterns.
The following challenges were seen this week:
- We have not had a good time yet to actually have a team meet-up in a while. We all talk over group chat and see each other in class, but we haven't had a large block of time to actually sit down and code together. When it comes time to assemble the backend and data-scraping algorithms, we'd really like to be able to work on it as a team.
- Speaking of data-scraping, we're still quite concerned about this. We knew this was going to be the hardest part of the project ot begin with, but it's starting to dawn on us that we have a large challenge in front of us. We're thinking of just focusing on e-mail parsing first and get a solid algorithm for that before we look to FB parsing.
The following goals are to be tackled next week:
- Setup webpages for e-list and direct event posting
- Setup backend and start to establish event database
- Finish up frontend calendar feature: namely clicking an event to get its location and details. Also hoping to add Google Calendar integration
- Theorize more about natural language processing algorithms.
#Comments by Ming
- "We're thinking of just focusing on e-mail parsing" --that's even worse. Then you have to worry about connecting to someone's email
- Having a hard time to meet up? Consider a Google Hangouts or Skype group call.