We are SumoCoders, a Ghent-based webdesign & development firm

The Sumos

We participated with the whole team.

wakankdoen.be

Two years ago we also participated in the hackaton with our app: Wakankdoen.be

Our app won, and, sadly, introduced a problem in Ghent.

Before our app Ghent was pretty empty

But soon it became more crowded

and more crowded

Until it wasn’t very fun to go to Ghent..

hoedrukist.nu

So we decided to fix this problem, or at least build something that people could use to see how crowded Ghent was at the moment.For this we built HoeDrukIst.nu, or in English How Crowded is it now

if you open up the site in your browser, or on your mobile device, you will see at a glance how crowded parts of the city are.

The more red the images are the busier this part is.

When you open the detailpage of a certain area you will see some pictures and the numbers we based our calculations on

Datasets

So, what datasets did we use?

GIS Data Ghent

GIS data provided by the city of Ghent to define our zones.

Parking API

The parking API, provided by the city of Ghent, where we check how many parking-spots are available per parking.The parking is linked to a zone. The more spaces are taken, the busier a zone will be reported.

Weather API

A weather-api to show the current weather in Ghent.

Instagram API

The Instagram Real Time API, to grab recent photo’s and decide the busyness factor.

Twitter API

The Twitter Real Time API, to grab recent tweets and decide busyness factor

Future Datasets

Due to time constraints we couldn’t implement all datasets we would like to use.

Foursquare Check-ins

Foursquare, the more check-ins, the busier a zone will be.

Facebook Check-ins

Facebook, the more check-ins, the busier a zone will be.

Visit Ghent events

If we know there is a certain event in a zone, we can use this to tweak the algorithm which decides if a zone is crowded.

Datasets we dream about

Besides the existing datasets we would like to use other data, which isn’t available yet.

So if you can provide us with extra data: feel free to open it up (plz).

Telephone operators

Telephone operators know how many people are connected to their poles.

Bluetooth tracking

We know UGent was testing on bluetooth tracking to visualize crowd-movements.

Police data

Camera analyzingCrowd management

In Ghent there are several CCTV-installation which are used to monitor the crowd. Possibly there is software that can analyze these images.

Future?

We only got 6 hours, but we have a lot more ideas we couldn’t build in this short amount of time.

Improve algorithm

First off all, we would like to tweak the algorithm to be more accurate. At the moment we only have 1 day of data, on a snow day ;-)

Push

We would like to build a system that can push notification to users so we can warn them in case of very busy area’s, or even a disaster.

Forecasting!

Because we will gather data, we will be able to do some predicitions on busyness. Of course we need a lot of data before we can actually build this feature.

Habemus DATA

Our federated API

http://hoedrukist.nu/nl/zones/json

The theme was “Habemus Data”, so in this spirit we opened up our “calculated” data through our own API.

http://hoedrukist.nu

So this was in a nutshell our submission.Feel free to use or explore it, at: http://hoedrukist.nu