SOAP (Students Organizing Against Pollution) started as a collaborative project in the Database Systems class in Fall 2011. The aim was to collect and store data on brownfields in the Trenton Area, and also provide a way for interested citizens to easily query and view data for their neighborhoods.

Work on the system continued during the academic semesters as mentored research projects and in the Summer 2012 Database Systems class.

SOAP serves as the proof-of-concept for the CABECT project funded by NSF Award # 1141170.

During Summer 2012 two computer science majors, Shahzore Qureshi and Francisco Estevez, were funded through TCNJ’s MUSE program to work on the project “Balancing Open Information Access With Maintaining Privacy, Security And Reliability In The Age Of Social Computing”. They also worked on the project as mentored research during Spring 2012 and Fall 2012. They followed this up with a poster presentation at the ITiCSE Conference in Canterbury, UK in July 2013. Their trip was partially funded by the School of Science and the Department of Computer Science.
Click here to see what Shahzore and Francisco have to say about their experience.

Publication: Shahzore Qureshi, Francisco Estevez, and Sarah Monisha Pulimood. 2013. Students organizing against pollution: computational thinking across boundaries. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education (ITiCSE ’13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 356-356. DOI=10.1145/2462476.2465614 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2462476.2465614.

In Spring 2013, under the CABECT umbrella, students in my “Software Engineering” class and Professor Kim Pearson’s “Topics in Professional Writing: Blogging and Social Media” class collaborated with Habitat for Humanity, to develop additional modules for SOAP.

In Fall 2013, we took the collaboration a step further:
My “Database Systems” class is collaborating with Professor Pearson’s “Reporting on Health and Environment” class.
My “Software Engineering” class is collaborating with Professor Pearson’s “Serious Games for News” class.

Currently SOAP is hosted on Amazon’s cloud service at: http://ec2-23-23-190-5.compute-1.amazonaws.com/.

We’ve just migrated SOAP to TCNJ’s server at http://tardis.tcnj.edu/cabect/SOAP/index.php.

Students who have contributed, or are contributing, to SOAP’s design and development include:
Students in Database Systems, Fall 2011, Summer 2012, Fall 2013, and Fall 2015
Students in Software Engineering,Spring and Fall 2013, Spring and Fall 2014, Spring and Fall 2015, Spring 2016.
Students doing Mentored Research and MUSE-funded projects with me in Spring, Summer and Fall 2012, Spring and Fall 2013, Spring and Fall 2014, Spring 2015.