New York City - Traffic Collision Mapping Tutorial, by HP Haven OnDemand

Background

The HP Haven Big Data platform harnesses 100% of your data—structured and unstructured—to inform every decision and help you capitalize on opportunities and solve problems. Available on-premise or in the cloud, Haven offers Big Data analytics and next gen applications at unmatched speed and scale.

Through a mix of fun and real world challenges, HP is inviting the TopCoder community to learn how to build the next generation of Big Data and analytics apps using the Haven OnDemand platform. We hope that this series will be interesting, challenging, and rewarding for developers of all levels that are looking to gain valuable new skills and experience.  You can find the latest Topcoder challenges related to the HP Haven Big Data Platform here:

http://hphaven.topcoder.com/

More information about the complete HP Haven offering can be found at the HP Haven web site:

http://www8.hp.com/us/en/software-solutions/big-data-platform-haven/

New York City - Traffic Collision Mapping Tutorial, by HP Haven OnDemand

This is part of a series of challenges for Topcoder members to engage with the Vertica database and analytics platform, while at the same time tapping into the power of the broader Haven platform through APIs such as those from HP IDOL OnDemand. 

In a previous challenge, we installed a local version of the Vertica Analytics platform. In this challenge, we're going to providing you with automobile collision data from New York City in 2014.  The task for this challenge is to show the collision data graphically by plotting the collisions on a map of New York City.  In addition to plotting the locations of the collisions, you should provide the ability for the user to browse/filter the mapped data by time and category.  This is a rich data set and your application should allow the user to do the following:

• - Show accidents which had injuries
• - Show accidents which had deaths
• - Show accidents where pedestrians were involved
• - Show accidents where cyclist were injured or killed
• - Show accidents where motorist was killed or injured
• - Show accidents by contributing factor
• - Show # of vehicles involved in an accident
• - Show accidents by vehicle type

This can be a desktop or web application.  You have some creative license here about to generate and host the maps, although your application should read the raw data from Vertica.  You can use a full GIS solution or you can generate the maps using a technology such as Google Maps or OpenStreetMaps.     Here are some of the examples of other visualizations:

- Collisions by Time of Day Visualization

- New York City Buildings by Age 

Also, we'd like to know how you did it.  This is a tutorial-type challenge and we'd like you to produce a blog article and screensharing video about how the application works.   The Vertica installation instructions from the previous challenge are attached to this competition.

 

Final Submission Guidelines

Here are the steps to participate in the New York City - Traffic Collision Mapping Tutorial challenge:

1. You’ll be creating an application which performs the following functions:
   1. ���Read the New York City Collision Data from Vertica.
   2. Plots the locations of the accidents on a map of New York City.
   3. Allows users to filter the plotted accidents by various date dimensions and by the categories provided in the data.
2. If you decide to add any tables to Vertica besides the raw collision data, you should include data definition scripts which will create the tables and load the data in Vertica. This is where you might consider using additional datasets that you think would be interesting for your tutorial, and where you could (optionally) use IDOL OnDemand to help you e.g. by using OCR to extract and structure text from PDF datasets you have found elsewhere. Since mapping is an integral part of the challenge, you may also find it helpful to use the Geocode Package from the HP Haven Marketplace to help determine latitute and longitude based on an address for any new datasets you find.
3. You have creative license about what language/platform to use.  
4. This is a tutorial challenge. Your code should be clear and well documented.
5. You should provide instructions about how to deploy your application.
6. You should produce a blog post about your application. The blog post is an integral part of this challenge, and may even be featured on the HP developer community. Here is an outstanding example from another TopCoder member.  Remember to mask your API key so that you don't accidentally start sharing your free quota with the world.
7. You should produce a screensharing video which explains your code and how your maps are generated.
8. You should include a submission.txt file in the root folder of your submission zip which contains the URL's for your blog post and screensharing video.
9. We're currently running a Sweepstakes challenge which walks through the Vertica setup on a local VMWare instance.  We're also attaching a Vertica lab manual which describes how to add users, create schemas, and load data into the system.  It assumes, however, that you have the Vertica Virtual Server instance installed and locally available.
10. There is also sample code attached which describes how to connect to Vertica with Java.
11. Code Sample and IDOL OnDemand libraries are available at the IDOL OnDemand Github Repository.
12. Tutorials for IDOL OnDemand can be found here.