D-090-AlJafear

Inspiration

3 years ago, AlJafear team managed to build a global WIFI network of over 1.7million hotspots in 70+ countries. At that time, our goal was to offer our service completely for free in return for some ads to be displayed to the user for monetization. To tailor ads to users, we started building user profiles from the acquired factual and behavioral user data. We were extremely overwhelmed by the gigantic amount and quality of the legal data that can be acquired from the WIFI. We started to visualize the data we acquire, analyze it and build wide range of data-driven services on top of it. One of the venues we control the WIFI in is an international train station in London, with a total area of ~45,000 square meter, called St. Pancras International Train Station. This station experiences 280,000 to 320,000 visitors per day making it a small version of Al-Hajj. At this point of time, we started thinking of offering services to Al-Hajj.

What it does

AlJafear offers a solution to collect live behavioral data of pilgrims, e.g. outdoor & indoor accurate geo-location, and link them to factual data, e.g. name, country, age, gender, etc. Al-Jafear also provides a full suite of data visualization, data analysis and intelligence to support Hajj authorities in making data-driven decisions and offering wide spectrum of value added services. We care a lot about the holiness of the pilgrim’s experience and the wide diversity of pilgrims, for that we tailored our solution so as not to enforce the use of smartphones or mobile applications.

How we built it

We built AlJafear prototype using indoor positioning tools and WiFi APIs offered by the WiFi Access Point vendor (Xirrus). The various types of acquired data were stored in ELK stack. We then built a data visualization dashboard using Java for the backend and HTML, CSS and JavaScript for the front-end.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge was the gigantic amount of data, being heterogeneous and of different types. This required a huge effort to develop an approach to seamlessly deal with and analyze.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Managing to tell behavioural stories about pilgrims to help, along with human & artificial intelligence, in taking proper decisions to manage Hajj crowds.