Bone Explorer
The museum has approximately 10 Terabytes of X-ray CT scans ("cat scans") of fossils. They need an easy and useful application that will allow them to search an archive of images and information about the images.
There are several tasks in this challenge that can be addressed by multiple teams. User Experience can be greatly improved, especially where search interfaces are concerned.
Data Requirements:
- Show the quality of scan for a taxon (species)
- Specimen number
- Species name
- Be able to download that file
- Display additional information about the species, metadata about the file, including:
1) When was scan taken 2) KiloVolts (KV) - what was voltage and current when CT was taken 3) Who scanned it 4) Voxel size 5) Number of images 6) Averaging (calibration - number of images to take and average image values) 7) Skip (Averaging plus skip is total number of images) 8) Timing value 9) Current
- The front end of a Content Management System for maintaining existing scans of data, uploading new scans and documenting existing museum data (including scan metadata)
- A search interface that better serves the needs of the paleontologists
- A method for generating preview movies / images to view scans at a glance (script to generate thumbnails?)
- A back end API that can recall the metadata for images in the archive (parsing .pca files)
- Digimorph - a National Science Foundation dynamic archive of information on digital morphology and high-resolution X-ray computed tomography of biological specimens at the University of Texas in Austin.
- National Museum of Natural History search interface
- CT image stacks of TIFF files (Please ask Hack the Dinos organizers for the USB stick containing images)
- .pca files with metadata - need translation of file format / parameters (Please ask Hack the Dinos organizers for the USB stick containing .pca files)
- Sit down with the paleontologists and understand their needs for searching scans
