UWMap

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  Working model of the map

Inspiration

We were inspired to create our project out of a desire to help out the community. This product is mainly targeted towards UW Madison students.

What it does

Our final product will enable UW Madison students to plot out their classes on a customizable map. We intend to promote involvement on the campus by incorporating UW Madison campus events. We believe that using a visual medium for showing events will provide students a convenient tool for planning out their week. We also plan to add in the locations of e-bikes to better promote physical well-being.

So far our project is still in the works. The current Iteration of our project has successfully incorporated a map to add in event details and a database to store in the Madison events.

How we built it

Web scrapped the information and turned it into a dictionary

Ran the dictionary through the panda data frame to clean up the data

Ran the information through the Geopy library to figure out the exact coordinates of an event

Plotted the coordinate and information out on a map created using Folium

Our main coding language while working on this project was python

Challenges we ran into

Web Scrapping: Originally we worked on scrapping the event information, location, and dates from the official UW Madison event page, but that proved very challenging. But the way that the information was stored in the website made it difficult to grab what we wanted UW Madison event page: https://today.wisc.edu/

Later on we switched our strategy and focused on scrapping our data from another website. We were successful and ended up with a csv file with the event name, location, and time. Website we ended up scrapping from: https://www.eventbrite.com/d/wi--madison/events--this-weekend/

Data Formatting: Unlike the csv files that we were provided in data science classes, the csv that we stored our data in was pretty messy. We spent a good portion of our morning attempting to figure out how to format the data into a nice table that we could use for mapping out the events. Additionally, some of the events that we web scrapped couldn't be converted into an address using geopy, so we had to skip over those events. This was a hassle to resolve.

Accuracy of Location: This is something that we'll have to work on more, but some events aren't located correctly on the map.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Scrapping the data from an online website

Cleaning the data

Creating a map for plotting the events

Converting the location into coordinates

What we learned

• Cleaning up data
• Using folium, geopy and BeautifulSoup
• How to read documentation for different libraries
• Utilize google as a direct tool to search for what we need

What's next for UWMap

• Adding an input section for students to also map out their classes
• Scrapping e-bike locations
• Running our program on a website for others -Using WiscAlert data to highlight a portion of the map for people to avoid

Built With

• beautiful-soup
• folium
• geopy
• panda
• python
• requests