Digital Field Book
Connected mobile computing devices and rapid app development have revolutionized many industries with user friendly touchscreen interfaces, a myriad of sensors and peripherals, and awesome computing power in small packages. It's time to make tablets and smartphones a regular fixture in the toolkit of paleontologists and bring "field notes" for scientific expeditions into the 21st century!
Some features paleontologists are looking for (not necessarily all version 1.0 requirements):
- "Shopping list" (or general to-do list, or checklist) for an expedition
- Sharing features with collaborators on site and abroad
- Digital "catalog cards" to document your specimens
- User defined export formats for documented specimens to directly transfer their data into collections databases
- Photo and video capture of sites and specimens with automated geotagging
- Offline satellite maps of sites to tap and flag where specimens are discovered
- Auto-fill fields of data with specified options (if you already know which localities you're going to excavate) so that the user doesn't have to type up locality names and other repetitive information out in the field
- Alternatively a "smart" auto-completion function that allows you to complete your entries as you type based on previous field values (kind of like how Excel does it)
- Allowing upload of PDFs/images or ability to open PDFs/images of research articles and locality maps (see examples under the "Resources" category)
- Ability to draw on the tablet (for quarry maps)
- Spreadsheet to deal with expense management
- Integration with FileMaker
- Export maps with all specimens collected. Alternatively a video feature showing collection through time.
- Build a responsive web app or native app for tablet/smartphones that meets the requirements described above
- Gaia GPS - potential reference app with offline maps, ability to take photos
- Photo / scan of actual handwritten field book
- Photo / scan of "master" field book combining multiple researchers' field books
- Fields for all data to collect on site from paleontologists
- Mockup ideas for app screens
