Kearney Outdoor Learning Area

ITESM Capstone Collaboration: KOLA Data Portal

Posted on by Troy

In Spring 2023 the GaugeCam team at the University of Nebraska worked with two excellent student groups on their capstone projects in the Departamento de Computación and Escuela de Ingeniería y Ciencias at Tecnológico de Monterrey (ITESM).

The first group we are featuring is the KOLA Data Portal Team. These students did an amazing job creating a web interface for multimodal environmental data! Professor Elizabeth López Ramos was the instructor for this capstone course.

This project was focused on creating a data portal for the Kearney Outdoor Learning Area (KOLA) site that is located next to the Kearney, NE High School. The project was designed to simulate real interaction with clients and included two phases.

PHASE 1: Gather list of client requirements and develop proposal.

  • Requirement gathering and analysis based on meetings with client.
  • Research and brainstorm to devise innovative and practical solutions.
  • Create a concise proposal outlining solutions, timeline, budget, and benefits for the client.
  • Present refined proposal to the client, highlighting alignment with requirements and receiving feedback.

PHASE 2: Build out the data ingestion platform based on the accepted proposal.

  • Construct platform, including features and functionality described in the proposal.
  • Test platform functionality, performance, and security to meet client requirements and industry standards.
  • Present the platform to the client for feedback and iterate to meet expectations and requirements.

A view and description of KOLA can be seen in the screenshot below.

A view of KOLA courtesy of https://outdoorclassne.com.

The key deliverables for the KOLA Portal project included the ability to upload and access several types of sensor data, including sound recordings, imagery, and scalar data (e.g., water levels). We met weekly with the KOLA Team. Students led those meetings, providing important updates and proposing next steps. As described in their final presentation, their solution consisted of the following:

The KOLA Portal has an attractive welcome screen, including a site map showing the various sensors that provide environmental data.

The green rectangle in the screenshot below highlights how we can now navigate from viewing the sensors, to adding a sensor, adding scalar data, and adding multimedia data on the platform.

The portal also allows us to view sample data we provided the team, as shown below.

The KOLA Team also provided excellent documentation of the whole project! This was provided in a summary handoff email at the end of the semester. The video below shows the User Manual for the portal. The team also provided (1) an API reference and (2) a deployment guide that walks the user through the process of setting up the environment, navigating the codebase, and deploying the portal with the Next.js framework and Vercel hosting platform.

Overall, the KOLA Data Portal Team were highly productive and very professional. We are very grateful to Professor Elizabeth López Ramos and Professor Gildardo Sánchez Ante for involving us in the course. We learned a lot in the process and would love to work with other ITESM students in the future!