Gapwise

Inspiration

Gapwise started with a simple problem: university schedules show students where and when their classes happen, but they do not help with everything between those classes.

I created Gapwise as a University of Toronto student to make that time useful. The project combines timetable planning with campus navigation so students can understand not only their schedule, but how their day actually fits together.

What it does

Gapwise is a free and open-source timetable and campus planning platform for University of Toronto students.

It is designed to help students:

organize and understand their timetable
navigate across the University of Toronto's campuses
find buildings, entrances, and useful campus locations
understand the time and walking routes between classes
make better use of gaps in their schedule

Gapwise currently provides outdoor navigation across U of T's tri-campus system, covering UTM, St. George, and UTSC, with the project continuing to expand.

Why open source

Gapwise is built around a simple principle: tools that improve student life should be accessible to the students who need them.

Gapwise is free and open source. Its development is public, its code can be inspected and improved by the community, and the project is designed around the needs of U of T students rather than advertising or subscriptions.

How I built it

I designed and developed Gapwise as an independent student-led software project. The project has grown into a multi-repository open-source ecosystem covering the web application, campus data, documentation, AI integrations, and mobile development.

A major part of the work has involved turning real university geography and scheduling information into structured data that software can reason about and present clearly to students.

The project also focuses heavily on accessibility to software agents and search engines, using structured, machine-readable information so that both humans and AI systems can understand what Gapwise provides.

Challenges

Campus navigation is much more complicated than placing buildings on a map.

Entrances, paths, campus boundaries, building geometry, inconsistent source data, and differences between U of T's three campuses all have to be represented accurately while keeping the interface fast and understandable.

Another challenge has been maintaining a growing open-source project across multiple repositories while keeping data, documentation, branding, CI, and deployments consistent.

What I learned

Building Gapwise has taught me how quickly a small idea can turn into a real software system.

I have worked across frontend development, geographic data, CI/CD, repository architecture, documentation, deployment, accessibility, search discoverability, and open-source project management.

More importantly, I have learned how to design software around a real community and continuously improve it based on how students actually use it.

What's next

The long-term goal is to make Gapwise a comprehensive open-source planning and navigation layer for the University of Toronto.

Development continues across timetable tools, campus navigation, richer campus data, mobile applications, and integrations that allow other software and AI agents to work with Gapwise.

Gapwise will remain free and open source.

Built and maintained by Andrew Muratov, a Computer Science student at the University of Toronto Mississauga.