This term I decided to do something risky: namely I decided to give a “practically” real project to my undergraduate software-engineering class, CMPUT 301, based on the City of Edmonton’s (CoE) open data.
The CoE is at the forefront of open-data initiative among Canadian cities, with Nanaimo, Vancouver and Toronto. It has launched a broad Open Data Initiative, which will develop an online open data catalogue for data managed by the City. The intent motivating the initiative is to enable Edmonton’s research and IT communities to create innovative and sustainable solutions. For example, MyStops and Route 411 are iPhone applications developed by local IT companies for Edmontonians using Open Transit data released less than one year ago.
The objective of the CMPUT301 project was to explore some of the possibilities around linking Edmonton’s open-data catalogue with other data available online to afford interesting services to anyone who wants to learn more about our city. More specifically, I asked my student teams to develop an application to help visitors to our city make the best of their time in Edmonton.
The project requirements I gave my students are shown below.
Imagine someone visiting Edmonton for a conference, who is going to be here for a week. The visitor’s days are pretty packed but there are some open slots for lunches and dinners, and — truth be told — our visitor is considering skipping the conference on the occasional afternoon. Moreover, our visitor has friends and colleagues in Edmonton at the same time. So, our visitor will use your application to get some personalized advice about what to do with his/her free time while in Edmonton!
Given his/her
- preferences
- schedule
- friends
the application will
- advise on restaurants, shows and events
- provide information about how much they cost, where they are and how to get there
- suggest friends who might have similar schedules and preferences and may want to join in the outings
The information should be intuitively visualized on a calendar and a map view. The visitor should be able
- to explore multiple pieces of advice (if the first one is not perfect), and
- to keep or loose any specific ideas.
Since I have been privileged to work with the City on another activity, I asked them to sponsor the project with an award for the top team and they were kind enough (and interested enough in this effort) to offer a $500 award for the best project!
In the end I had 11 quite interesting projects and the best ones uploaded screencasts on youtube:
- team bravo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pM18D92uF7Q
- team charlie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdvoaYUJNnU
- team delta: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mrUM-v6uuI
- team foxtrot: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jsPw3qVQvI&hd=1
In the end our CoE partners decided to give not only the award they promised (to the top team “charlie”) but two more honorable mentions (to teams “bravo” and “delta”) since they liked them so much that they could not but recognize them!
I am delighted, excited and pumped for more such collaborations! After I mark my 301 finals that is…
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Eleni, this is *seriously AWESOME* work! And it makes me think we should dream up a project together. I’m trying to pull together something with some folks (mostly Arts ppl but also including Matt Dance) that would talk about place (site-specific, infused with meaning, etc) that can be made visible through plotted GIS specificities … but it is hard to think about. Anyway, this kind of thing is why I teach. I love seeing stuff like this. Kudos to you!
Thanks for the kind words Heather! There is tons of potential in this area and I, too, would be very excited in doing something with you (and other arts’ people) in the area. Think up something and let’s plan over bevies!
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Mack D. Male, mattdance and mattdance. mattdance said: http://ssrg.cs.ualberta.ca/blogs/WS-20-3D/2010/12/20/my-cool-cmput-301-class-this-fall-2010/ /cc @mastermaq CMPUT 301 Blog by Eleni S [...]
Cool projects. Good to see people using the data the city invested time and money into making public. Edmonton’s open-data catalog was very useful in the creation of my transit app for Android devices. I entered the app in the Apps for Edmonton competition this summer and it was well received by the judges for its simplicity, or so I heard.
Today, ETS Stops gets used more than 1300 times per week by 400 users, providing what ETS’s bus-link telephone service does, but much faster.
http://code.djgamblore.com/ETS_Stops
[...] Here is a blog post my professor wrote which provides a little more background on the project. [...]
And we made it to the Journal! http://www.edmontonjournal.com/news/student+could+become+smartphone+guide+Edmonton/4020769/story.html?cid=megadrop_story
[...] and inventive visualizations. And of course, this past Fall 2010, my CMPUT301 students developed an application for Edmonton visitors based on City-of-Edmonton open data. And of course, I have also been several times a mentor for UCOSP, supervising distributed [...]
[...] I am terribly disappointed to be confronted with this failure, just after the “high” of the publicity around my City-of-Edmonton inspired project in my CMPUT course. [...]