Authors: Maruboina Bhavitha, Manthena Chandra Prabhas, Mangali Namdev, Mamidi Pradeep Kumar, Umesh Kumar Kushva
Abstract: Lost and found management in college campuses and public spaces is frequently handled through informal channels such as WhatsApp groups, social media posts, notice boards and word of mouth. Although these channels support quick communication, they do not provide a persistent, searchable or accountable record of reports. Important information can become buried, duplicate reports can appear, and a person who has found an item may have no systematic way to connect it with the person who lost it. Ownership verification is also a concern because a photograph or general description alone is not always sufficient evidence of rightful ownership. FINDLY is a centralized web-based Lost & Found Portal proposed to organize the complete recovery lifecycle. The system follows the workflow REGISTER → REPORT → DISCOVER → MATCH → NOTIFY → VERIFY → RECOVER. Users can create lost or found reports containing category, description, location, date and photograph. Listings can be searched and filtered, while a multi-factor matching process can compare keywords, category, location, date and photo-related information to identify potential relationships. Notifications draw attention to possible matches, while a claim and ownership-verification stage separate matching from the final handover decision. Administrative moderation supports approval, rejection, duplicate flagging and dispute handling. Recovered items are marked as resolved so that the recovery lifecycle has an explicit endpoint. The project focuses on organizing fragmented information rather than relying on a single automated algorithm. The supplied project documentation provides the functional design, data model, implementation plan and test plan for the proposed system. Quantitative metrics presented in this paper are explicitly illustrative prototype values and should be replaced with measured project results before final submission.
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