The Hackathon organised by Farvest in collaboration with Digital Luxembourg has been a great success, with more than 130 participants in 35 teams, more than 22 of which opted for the Open Data challenge.
The Hackathon was a first for the Grand Duchy, forming part of the launch of the Open Data Portal, a portal bringing together data gathered by the public authorities. The Open Data challenge consisted of opening up and making freely available a set of locked data on mobility: public transport infrastructures, real-time bus schedules and routes, data structure for self-service bike hire, geolocation data, etc.
Each team had about three minutes for its pitch. The standard of the contributions was very high, and after much deliberation the jury decided that the three most innovative applications were:
- Etix Kru: An application for secondary-school pupils encouraging e-learning by calculating the CO2 emissions of various means of transport. The app includes an interactive geo-quiz.
- ING Fitbus: A fitness application to help users keep fit by calculating the number of calories burnt and proposing alternative means of transport and routes (bike, bus stop further away, etc.).
- ION with “Transport for Luxembourg”: The team has refined and enriched the data available on the Open Data portal and developed a Twitterbot to inform users of bus and train departures in real time.
The Coder Dojo team won a special award for being the youngest participants in the Hackathon; their Pick-a-Poop application consists of an interactive map of dog-poop bag dispensers.
Why is mobility data the first data to become available?
When Luxembourg started with the Open Data project, the project team quickly identified key domains where access to data was lacking and where significant contributions could be made.
A review of more established Open Data initiatives in other countries identified mobility as one of the key Open Data domains. This is also the case here in Luxembourg, especially given the intermodal and international commuting traffic, and associated fragmented information crossing several providers, regions and countries.
The project team thus decided to focus on smart mobility for the “Game of Code Hackathon” challenge. Thanks to the commitment of the minister for sustainable development to open data, we managed to get agreements from the VerkeiersVerbond to open up several key public transport datasets, including the transport network, timetables as well as live data concerning bus departures and delays. Luxembourg’s state authorities are also opening up fundamental public datasets enabling mobile location based services, location information such as address data, demography and work statistics and many more.
The objective is to open up data and engage with the reuse community to stimulate the creation of innovative solutions in that particular domain and engage as early as possible with data users, especially interested startups that want to build new products and businesses on top of these newly opened datasets. Open Data thus paves the way to wider benefits for society, including but not limited to more efficient transport, increased transparency, and new economic activities for Luxembourg.
