Local technologists shared ideas and worked together at Mobility Lab’s recent Data Visualization Hack Day. It’s great to take an online community and bring folks together.
One of the participants, Ted Eytan, has already shared his experience of how he learned about new available data sets – see Walking on Mondays Looks Like a Healthy, Smart Business Strategy.
My own project that afternoon was to create an interactive Voronoi diagram for the Capital Bikeshare network. The map redraws boundaries as if your mouse position were a new CaBi station. It could be used as a tool to determine where to place new stations. The larger the new cell you create, the larger the region that now has a station closer than any of the other choices. And, at a minimum, it’s fun to watch the cells change shape as you move your mouse across the image. You can find out more about it at my blog.
We were happy to have a WMATA employee join us. For the first time, WMATA has made their GTFS data available (for now, the link is available only on the hackpad we created for the event). The GTFS data (that’s “general transit feed specification”) includes schedules for 19 regional rail and bus systems. Though this data has been visualized before, I wanted to see how difficult it would be to make my own animation:
As it turns out, GTFS is several degrees more complex than animating trip-history data, like I’ve done before with CaBi (see Neighborhood CaBi Animations). GTFS encompasses a group of files, basically a relational database. There are more details on my blog (see Washington Region’s Transit Network).
Before visualizing data, you of course first have to access the data. To facilitate accessing your own trip history data for CaBi and WMATA, a few participants formed a team to build tools to “screen-scrape” your personal data. Though these projects are still ongoing, you can try them out and join their efforts via their GitHub sites for the CaBi Screen-scraper and WMATA Screen-scraper projects (and a new scraper has been started for Car2Go).
We’ve got a few Hack Day photos on Flickr, with the tag hackday2013mar.
Mobility Lab loves helping people find healthy, efficient, and sustainable transportation options. Encouraging techies to discover new data sources and share innovations is part of our mission. Thanks to everyone who made this past Hack Day a success.
Photo by M.V. Jantzen