Summary

Determination of the trendiest neighborhoods in Barcelona based on the geolocalization of the recent posts in the social networks and, in the future, data of pedestrian flow sensors. 

Full Description

The identification of the places where there is more activity in a city can be a very useful tool for both people in the city and tourists.

CityFlow provides real-time information about the hot areas in Barcelona, based on the information given by Instagram API.

Technical Description

The Instagram API is constantly queried by a server to determine the localization of the recent uploaded pictures. The information of the post is saved in a database, which feeds the web app with the current Instagram activity in the city. The web, then, shows the Instagram activity in a graphical way.
 
On the other hand, the real-time information about the number pedestrians that would be queried to iCity sensors in Barcelona. Since currently there are only 3 sensors in the city, we do not show this information yet.

Web app

The web app is basically a visual tool to manage all the informations in the database. The main task of the web is to show the users the activity in the different areas of the city in a dynamic and visual way. 

For doing that, we have chosen to customize a plain Google Maps map with the Google Maps v3 API. 

The web app shows a heatmap based on the number of Instagram posts distribution, from green for a low activity, to red for the areas of more activity in the city.





By clicking the Neigbhourhoods tab, the user can see the distribution of the city by districts. The districts with more posts are drawn with more emphasis than the others. In Barcelona, there are 10 districts with approximately 7 neighbourhoods each one. By zooming, the user will change the point of view from districts to neighbourhoods.



Passing the mouse over a neighbourhood or a district will show the number of posts in that zone in the last 30 minutes, the last three published photos and its hashtags.


Moreover, the web application provides, in a graphical way, the distribution of posts among the districts in the last 30 minutes. In a near future, we will be able to predict the districts in which there will be more people, for a given day of the week and a given hour. 



Possible stakeholders

The most important stakeholders that are going to be interested in us are going to be the following:

  • Citizens: they can decide  where to go depending on their preferences. 
  • Taxi companies: they are going to be capable to organize their fleet organization depending on the information given. Moreover they could see where the hot spots are in low occupancy hours in their ordinary routes. 
  • Municipalities: will be useful for security organization, to identify the most popular events that are taking place in the city and to relate popularity of the events with the zone.

Future improvements
  • Develop a mobile app to be more accessible to all the users
  • Use more data from other sources, as complementary social networks
  • Deploy a huge network of pedestrian flow sensors in the most interesting areas


Video presentation


 TEAM

Competitiu

 MEMBERS

Ricard Boada
ricardboada@gmail.com
Sergi Caelles
scaelles@gmail.com
Mariona Dalmau
marionadalmau23@gmail.com
Alejandro Fernández
alejandro.fernandez.tomas@live.com
Alberto Gómez
alberto.gomez.gonzalvo@gmail.com
Miquel Martí
miquel.marti.92@gmail.com

 
GITHUB

https://github.com/scaelles/Barcelona-CityFlow

https://github.com/scaelles/Barcelona-CityFlow-server

IBM BLUEMIX USE

php application, ClearDB MySQL Database


GLOBAL AWARDS

Best Data Project