Geo Spatial Database Activity Visualization Tracker

In today’s business environment, companies should be empowered to explore their data through a simple, visual medium, rather than overwhelming and time-expensive tabular reports. Virginia Tech’s IT department provides services to supply international and domestic students, faculty, staff, parents, and alumni with IT and computer solutions. Maptivity is a tool that our group built for the IT department. Our focus was to provide them with a way to more effectively see connections and patterns among data collected from these services. This was accomplished by developing a software framework that displays a world map and shows pings for data events.

Our client, Claire Gilbert, executive director of IT experience and engagement at Virginia Tech, supplied us with data of incoming and outgoing phone call services. We designed this project with the intention of receiving a real-time data feed; however, due to the permissions required and timeframe given, we instead worked with previously logged data as a proof of concept. The end result was a unique playback simulation feature. This feature provides customizable playback and analysis of any data set.

We currently have the entirety of the call center’s phone data for the years 2016 and 2017 stored on our server. Our server parses the phone data into a common object format first, then the client can run simulations on this data at up to 100,000x speed. After the data points ping on the map, the points are then retained on the map as translucent bubbles, providing a heatmap effect over time.