Open Data Hackathon

February 21-22nd, 2015

The International Open Data Day was celebrated on February, 21st. In order to mark this event, more than 100 programmers, activists, journalists and geographers met at the Open Data Hackaton (February 21-22nd) and worked together on 17 projects.

Two teams within our company took part in the event and they developed the projects “Localitățile fictive din România”/”Fictitious Localities in Romania” and “Eu pe ce stradă stau?”/ “What Street do I live on?”

The project “Localitățile fictive din România”/ “Fictitious Localities in Romania” undertook to identify and document the issues of the Romanian national localities system. The purpose of the project was to get a viable and accurate network of localities. It ranked a well-deserved 3rd place in the competition.

In two days, the 12 members of the team managed to identify 126 localities presenting various issues. The list was published on Facebook, Wikipedia, by means of a map and table information application and an interactive map application, created with the Esri Technology (ArcGIS Online).

The project “Eu pe ce stradă stau?”/ “What Street do I live on?” aimed to identify and document the issues related to the street names in Bucharest. The ten members of the team worked with data from the Romanian Post (postal codes), from official common classifications published on the websites of Municipalities and Permanent Electoral Authority (AEP), Wikipedia and Open Street Map etc.

Based on the three data sets analyzed, 346 differences were identified – most of them being streets which can be found in the AEP database and cannot be found among the other data provided by Bucharest Municipality of by the Romanian Post.  At the same time, the team identified differences in the name of the same road in distinct databases.

The result of the project was a web map, created with Esri Technology (ArcGIS Online) containing the streets with ambiguous names (in order to browse the map, the command Bookmarks is to be used).