FloriadeRadar

I was approached by Non-fiction to build this service. They have started working for the Physical Planning Department of the City of Amsterdam (DRO), in an effort to explore the opportunities of realtime analytics for longterm physical planning for Amsterdam. In this light, Non-fiction approached me to build a weather map of checkins, captions and other site-specific online social activities in Amsterdam Holendrecht, using the most commonly used mobile media Foursquare, Instagram and Twitter.

What did I build?

The FloriadeRadar (or, Geoheap, as the project is called internally) is a "social weather map" of Amsterdam. Or, in geek terms: an Erlang-powered location-based-services aggregator engine with a Google maps browsing interface.

The geoheap is a constantly-running aggregation service which continiously gathers data from Twitter, Instagram and Verbeter de Buurt and stores every item in a MongoDB database. A search index (powered by Solr) makes this data available to a realtime visualization. The fullscreen map interface has a search bar to filter for certain keywords and/or user names. The time bar at the bottom shows the volume of social objects (tweets, pictures, ...) of the last week.

Unfortunately the service is currently offline for maintainance as we're in the process of moving it to a virtual server with more processing capacity.

The project's source code is available on github.