NEWS

Teddington Park resident a finalist in open data contest

DATA ELEPHANT: Midtown app developer Marcus Williams, second from right, and teammates  Jean-Christophe Pilaprat, left, Rudy Desjardins and Francis Jeanson are in the top five in national contest.
DATA ELEPHANT: Midtown app developer Marcus Williams, second from right, and teammates Jean-Christophe Pilaprat, left, Rudy Desjardins and Francis Jeanson are in the top five in national contest.

Over a 48-hour span Feb. 20–22, Marcus Williams and three friends hunkered down, hour after hour, manipulating data from three levels of government and using it for their own benefit.

They are not Anonymous.

They are top five finalists in the Canadian Open Data Experience 48-hour Hackathon.

Working out of Williams’ Teddington Park home, the group developed a mobile app they have called Wanderfull. When a user enters his or her current location and destination the app will suggest a route and include points of interest — libraries, trails or community centres — along the way.

“A lot of these points of interest are taken from the City of Toronto’s open geographic data,” Williams pointed out.

Marcus Williams
DATA IN THE ROOM: Marcus Williams says his team intentionally used data not often used by other competitors in creating their app.

The app also combined data from the two other levels of government, including farmers’ markets from the province and socio-economic data from the national household survey, to determine things such as non-official languages spoken in a specific area.

“We settled in on the idea that local spatial data could be interesting to use,” he said. “It looked like it had been a bit under-utilized in the previous year’s hackathon.”

Williams, 35, along with team members Jean-Christophe Pilaprat, Rudy Desjardins and Francis Jeanson, went by the team name Data Elephant. It comes with their tagline “the data in the room”, which Williams says is a play on the saying the elephant in the room.

“It’s the data that’s sitting there all along that nobody really wanted to talk about or knew what to do with,” he said. “But we’re going to talk about it.”

In total, 125 teams participated and submitted apps. The winner will be announced March 26. Williams says he’s happy with the experience, win or lose.

“If we were to win we’d be thrilled,” he said. “But we’re just happy to have made it this far.”