Open Data Student Awards 2021 Results

On October 23, 2021, we announced the winner of the 2021 Open Data Student Awards at Dinacon. It was the first time the event was awarded at Dinacon and the fourth time we had the honor to present the award.

First of all, we would like to thank everyone who entered one of their works. All of your ideas were an inspiration to us and are valuable contributions to promote the use of open data.

This year’s jury consisted of the following people:

Maud Chatelet: Project Manager at Opendata.ch
André Golliez; Co-Founder / Managing Partner Zetamind, Vorstand Opendata.ch
Jannis Valaulta; CH Open Vorstandsmitglied
Prof. Stefan Keller; Informatik-Professor, HSR Rapperswil

They had the joy of looking at all contributions and the difficult task of choosing the winning entry.

We congratulate Marco Crisafulli and Dominic Monzón for winning the award with their bachelor thesis «Estimating the completeness of OpenStreetMap POI data with machine learning methods»

Below we present to you the three nominated projects.

Estimating the completeness of OpenStreetMap POI data with machine learning methods

OpenStreetMap, OSM for short, is steadily spreading as an alternative to Google Maps. OSM can be used to implement apps such as OrganicMaps and thematic maps such as the Castle Dossier Map. The question is how good the quality is, because OSM is collected by volunteers. Of particular interest is the completeness of the points of interest (POI). Currently, there is no solution to this, especially because there are hardly any “gold standards” that could be used as a comparison.
In their bachelor’s thesis, Marco Crisafulli and Dominic Monzón – both computer science students at OST Campus Rapperswil – solved this problem using machine learning methods.

Ask Open Data

The amount of open datasets provided by the government has been steadily growing in the last few years. Sadly ordinary people can’t benefit from this data, because working with large CSV files or specialized APIs is a huge barrier for them. This is why Philippe Voinov & Marc Bitterli created Ask Open Data. A website that answers questions with available open data and lets the user create a poster visualizing the answer.

Fit for 55

Under the slogan “fit for 55”, the EU has formulated the goal of reducing CO2 emissions by 55% by 2030 compared to 1990. In this context, a ban on the sale of combustion engines by 2035 is also planned. For us, this is reason enough to take a closer look at the spatial aspects of this proposal as part of Block Project I – Geovisualisation. For this purpose, Andrea Röösli, Andreas Eisenring and Patrick Flückiger decided to use the geodata of the city of Zurich – to sketch its traffic volume, the current situation of stationary traffic and a possible need for parking spaces with charging stations.