Seek International - Global Delivery Pod | Dictionary of Earth
Awards & Nominations
Seek International - Global Delivery Pod has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!
The Challenge | Dictionary of Earth
Seek Dictionary (beta)
Chrome extension Dictionary that automatically detects scientific terms in the webpage and provides a definition+illustration pop-up when user clicks on it. Powered by trusted scientific dictionaries and crowdsourcing.
Important Note: Seek Dictionary is a live product in the Chrome Webstore which you can download here and test out.
What problem are we trying to solve?
There's about a dozen branches of science, each with dozens of subspecialties, with each subspecialty having even more technical words.
There are so many technical words that even scientists have a hard time keeping up with each other. If scientists are struggling, where does that leave the general public?
Imagine reading a short 500-word scientific journal containing 20 technical jargon unknown to you. You know that there is a treasury of knowledge in that article, but the idea of searching up each of these 20 words one-by-one in Google (or any other dictionary) is discouraging you. What would you do? Would you just give up on new knowledge?
What is the Solution?
"Seek Dictionary" makes searching up the meaning of new words effortless. "Seek dictionary" currently exists as a chrome extension which you can already download here
When enabled, "Seek Dictionary" automatically detects specific scientific terms within a website. A single click of these words would immediately bring up a short definition of the word from a trusted source + a relevant illustration to help you understand the said term. As for the 20 technical jargons we mentioned earlier, you can know learn those words up with Alt+Tab-ing to search them up individually.
Our team believes that by improving the user experience of looking up a dictionary, the entry barrier to scientific knowledge will be much lower, leading to a much more enjoyable learning experience.
How complete is the project now? Where do we go from here?
Currently, our team has been able to include ~1,000 geological terms in our dictionary (within the 30+ hours we had during the Hackathon). To test out "Seek Dictionary", just download it from Chrome web store and enable. Then head to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geology (or any geology-centric website) to see the magic happen (highlighted geological terms which you can click to get the definition of).
However, as time permits, we will look to gradually include other branches of sciences and other fields of knowledge. The idea is that a user should be able to toggle between different subject areas and languages - the dictionary will only highlight terms relevant to the subject.
What hackathon award do we think this project is suitable for?
Best use of data: We are scraping available data that is "out there" in different scientific dictionaries that might otherwise be unused. Google Search has made information discoverable, and our Dictionary seeks to make part of the same information accessible and user-friendly. By making valuable knowledge accessible, we believe we're making the best use of information that already exists.
Galactic impact: Half the world is connected to the internet. Google Search and Wikipedia has helped the internet population learn new knowledge, impacting the world in a way many educational institutions can only dream of. Seek Dictionary targets 59% of all browsers (about 2 billion people) by offering the scientific dictionary for free.
If you think that we have something good going here, please vote for us and help us take this to the next level (so we can invest some time to link up more dictionaries)!
Data we used for this project:
- NASA science site glossary
- Geology.com
- merriam-webster.com
Check out our codes here:
SpaceApps is a NASA incubator innovation program.