GSoC/2019/StatusReports/FerenczKovács

Import of educational data sets available on the internet

There are many internet pages providing data sets for educational and academic purposes concerning various fields of science, and not only (astrophysics, statistics, medicine, etc.). Some tools used in the scientific field provide some "wrappers" for such online sources and allow the user to easily investigate these data sets and work with them in all kinds of applications, whilst the technical details and methodology like the fetching of data from the server and parsing are done completely transparent for the user. The user doesn’t even know what happens in the “background”.

The goal of this project is to add similar functionality to LabPlot. This would make LabPlot more fit for educational purposes, students and teachers could use LabPlot for visualizing and analyzing data connected to the currently studied field. And also could bring LabPlot into the life of the average student.

Mentor: Fábián Kristóf

Project Goals

Provide functionality to easily fetch and process online datasets
Ease the process of searching for datasets, downloading them, preprocessing them then loading them into LabPlot
Gather a vast amount of datasets, and thematically categorize them into sections and subsections.
If time allows, implement a "welcome screen" (similar to the ones available in other applications, for example QtCreator, Visual Studio Code and others)

Work Report

Community Bonding Period

Investigating/analysing already existing solutions for uploading/downloading with KNS3 also KNS3's API documentation, checking out various welcome screens of other applications to get some inspiration, checking out some simpler caching implementations.

Communicating with my mentor and other from the LabPlot team to properly design the project, and also with the KDE community and other students accepted to KDE for GSoC

Week 1 (May 27-June 2) - Week 4 (June 17-23)

The very first step was to implement a new widget, called ImportDatasetWidget which could provide the functionality to:

list the available categories and subcategories of datasets
list the available datasets for a certain subcategory
refresh the list of datasets and delete the downloaded metadata files

We had to create metadata files in order to record additional information about datasets, and also to divide them into categories and subcategories. We use a metadata data file which contains every category and subcategory and a list of datasets for every subcategory. Additionally there is a metadata file for every dataset containing various data about the dataset.

In order to make possible the import of datasets into LabPlot I had to implement a helper class: DatasetHandler. This class deals with:

processing a dataset's metadata file
downloading the dataset and processes it
loads the dataset's content into LabPlot

I also implemented a new dialog (DatasetMetadataManagerDialog), which makes it possible for the user to add own datasets to LabPlot's list. This dialog provides an interface for the user to easily set the options necessary for the new dataset's metadata file.

I started to design and to create a prototype for our Welcome Screen. The current idea for the welcome screen is to provide the following functionalities:

Recently opened projects
Help section: Documentation, FAQ, etc.
Exploring datasets
Example projects
Latest release information
News section

For more details about what has been accomplished and videos about the implemented features in use check out my blog post

My Work

Contact

Email: [email protected]