Rain Drop, Drip Drop, Visualizing Change in the Watah

Inspiration

Water is something essential to human life and the ecosystems that surround us, however it is also a fairly unsteady and finite resource. Although almost 40% of California has escaped the drought because of this abnormally rainy winter, the UC Davis campus has made serious changes to customize our campus to handle the conditions the drought threatened to bring. In return, UC Davis was also able to drastically lower water consumption on campus thanks to the help of tracking software provided by OSIsoft. Unfortunately, water conservation is still something underrated to a majority of the student body as well as all those intertwined with it--thus, there's no way for those who are interested to investigate recent changes made, as well as follow the actual numerical data set on a locational basis. With that said, our team set out to make a visually friendly, and interactive learning page with a live data visualization map of all the buildings on campus and their weekly water usages--which are compared with a color theory we created for clarity purposes.

What it does

The interactive site utilizes parallax and simple web page building tools in order to engage a variety of audience members to be inspired to look into our on-campus water use. Although much of the page is filled with short-stated facts and colorful illustrations, it frames our main feature which is the map, which displays color coded circles that represent water usage for buildings on campus. Each circle represents a building that has water usage data available from OSISoft, the color represents if the usage this past week increased (red) or decreased (blue) compared to the week before, and the color intensity represents the significance of the change.

How we built it

The app is based on two APIs, the OSISoft API and the ArcGIS API. We use the OSISoft API to get live and past data on water usage for buildings where this data is available. This required understanding and filtering through the enormous amount of data that OSISoft provided using queries and traversing the database to find the correct information, then analyzing the data and performing operations on it. We used the ArcGIS API to create a map visualization of the data on our webpage. We added a map centered on UC Davis and threw in a large list of buildings and their coordinates provided by OSISoft. Then we matched buildings with the OSISoft data when available using internal identifiers and only rendered buildings on the map when data was available.

Challenges we ran into

The hardest part of the project was simply understanding the enormously powerful tools that were given to us. The OSISoft database was extremely complex and sometimes weirdly structured, and it took a few hours and multiple talks with the OSISoft representatives to figure out how to get the information needed. The ArcGIS API was also similarly complex, with so many different tools available with so many options that it was easy to be overwhelmed. Fortunately, representatives from the companies were able to help us figure out what we needed.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud that we were able to work as such a strong team under such intense working conditions and minor starvation. The HackDavis environment is, needless to say, a unique think tank of innovation and we're thankful to have participated in it's second year of coding for social good.