Transcript UMN Events Finder - University of Minnesota

University of Minnesota
Campus Event Finder
Department of Computer Science and Engineering,
University of Minnesota
Presented by
Murat Demiray & Mustafa Karamavus
Outline
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Motivation
Problem Statement
Related Works
Challenges
Solution
Validation
Conclusion & Future Work
Questions
Motivation
• Emergence of Location Based Services
– Different applications areas
• Requesting the nearest business or service
• Location sensitive transactions and alerts
• Turn by turn navigation to any address
– Make things easier
• More meaningful queries with location information
• User friendly representation interface based on maps
Motivation (Cont.)
• U of M Events Page provides limited functionalities
Problem Statement
• Input:
– A list of events on the campus and user queries
• Output:
– Query results represented on a map
• Objective
– For a given user query, finding and representing campus events
based on filters such as event time, date, category and location
– Visualization
• Constraints / Limitations
– Google Map
•
•
Location accuracy, distance accuracy
Directions
Related Works
Related Works (Cont.)
Challenges
• Accuracy
– Location
– Distance
• Data source
– might be inaccurate
– limited resources
– different data format
• Data representation
– map APIs allow limited functions
– user friendly interface
Solution
• A Web Application : U of M Event finder
• Platforms & Technologies:
– Visual Studio .NET 2008
– Asp. Net
– Google API
– PostGIS
Solution (Cont.)
• Event data entry to database
from university event page
-
XDocument rssFeed = XDocument.Load("https://events.umn.edu/tc/rss/week/");
var posts = from item in rssFeed.Descendants("item")
select new
{
title = item.Element(eventNamespace + "title").Value,
location = item.Element(eventNamespace + "location").Value,
startdate = item.Element(eventNamespace + "startDate").Value,
enddate = item.Element(eventNamespace + "endDate").Value,
starttime = item.Element(eventNamespace + "startTime").Value,
endtime = item.Element(eventNamespace + "endTime").Value,
link = item.Element("link").Value,
moreinfo = item.Element(eventNamespace + "moreinfo").Value,
};
-
user entry
Solution (Cont.)
• User search with filters:
–
–
–
–
–
•
date: day and days (interval)
time: interval
location: point and range
category
combinations of these
Representation of the results
representation on the map
• cartography
– textual representation
–
Demo
Validation & Results
• Experiment with U of M event data
– findings:
• Pros:
– Results are successfully retrieved according to user search
filter(s)
– Validation of visualization of results
• Cons:
– U of M event page data might be inaccurate
– In some cases, Google Map API can’t find locations from U of
M event location data
– Distance calculation is not precise
– Directions might be unrealistic
Conclusion & Future Work
• A web application which allows people to do a variety of
searches about the events on the U of M Twin Cities campus
with the objective of increase the number of attendance to
the events
• Future work:
– RSS from different sources ( SUA events, Bookstore events, Gopher
sports )
– Increasing accuracy in nearest search
– Different map APIs: Microsoft, Yahoo, ESRI
– Location based recommendations
•
•
Profile based: Favorite locations, categories and etc.
History based: history of the locations where user attended to the events
Question for the class:
• What kind of searches (filters) are users able to do in U of M
Even Finder? What other filter(s) can be added?
Questions?