College: For The People, By the People

Inspiration

Picking a college that fits you sucks. Its hard.

How it works

We pull tweets from around a university based on location, and pipe them through the alchemy API in order to obtain data on different topics and areas of interest in the university. We then filter this information into a usable graph that displays rating in each of our broad categories. This is done by storing our relevant data that we pull from the tweets in a sql database, and organizing it into major categories there.

Challenges I ran into

We didn't have enough time to properly use all of the data we collected, and and we also had a hard time collecting data due to some caps on API usage. We feel that we could have provided more specifics to a user in the form of category breakdowns.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We are proud of our sorting of data into usable categories that will actually help a user.

What I learned

Alchemy and Twitter API usage, as well as how natural language processing works. One of us also learned basic sql and php usage. We also learned how to break data down into usable chunks that we were better able to analyze.

What's next for College: For The People, By the People

Next, we would like to turn it into a more consumer oriented product that allows you to get more info, and find actual use out of it. At the moment it is very static, and in order to make it useful to a user, it would need to be fleshed out into a much more dynamic way of providing information: away from a proof of concept, and into a full product.

Built With

• alchemyapi
• heidisql
• laravel
• php