The current set of Princeton Tigerapps provide a variety of useful services, the most successful of which are arguably ICE, SCG and PTX for academic planning. While apps for providing information on campus social life like the Events Calendar and PAM do exist, the former sees decreasing usage and the latter by nature only concerns a section of campus. Notably, the Tigerapps lack an integrated, visually sensible interface that provides access to general campus information that changes on a day-to-day basis, and largely this is the reason that past attempts at this subject have been less successful. We propose the POM, an interactive campus map on which customizable and searchable layers of information important to students including campus events from the Events Calendar and facilities hours and statuses from Princeton's data feeds can be added.
The POM's fundamental interface will be similar to that of PAM, and will be a web app with buildings highlighted and clickable. POM will then include a panel of layers that will provide various types of services for users - currently, the key types of layers planned are a calendar-type functionality that displays the multitude of events occuring during a user-specified time period across campus, and a information-type functionality that displays such information as facilities hours, dining hall menus, and printer and laundry machine statuses. Layers can be customized through user-set settings, items on layers can be filtered through searches, additional items that users will inevitably find lacking can be added and shared through a simple interface, and layers can be displayed at the same time, in different colors. Essentially, the goal is to provide an all-in-one, visually appealing, and extendable interface that each user can customize to his or her needs.
A variety of new technologies allows us to expand POM to integrate with widely-used Web services such as Google and Facebook, time permitting. The POM web app will be primarily coded in Django and Javascript, but could include API calls to Facebook events and Google calendar that will allow users to add POM items to their personal accounts. Furthermore, should time allow, POM could be modularized to be independent of data specific to the Princeton campus - in other words, POM could serve as an open-source code-base that allows other developers to customize for their own mapping needs.