University of MinnesotaCampus 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?