NODE (Nashville Open Data Explorer)

Inspiration

Nashville is trying to become the next smart city. They have open data on a lot of public services and culture. Our initiative was to incorporate smart city data into an Amazon Alexa app to find parks, art, history, etc. This will hopefully teach people about Nashville and get them to be more active and go outside.

What it does

This Amazon Alexa skill queries Nashville Open Data for information on a variety of data collected by the city of Nashville. You can even ask which parks have picnic spots or about Nashville sculptures.

How we built it

We built this application using AWS, Amazon Developer, Amazon Echo, Serverless, and the SODA API. We used Javascript and node.js.

Challenges we ran into

This was our first hackathon ever!
It was our first time developing with an Echo, AWS, Lambda, Open Data API, and the Alexa-SDK
Alexa-SDK is complex
The HTTPS request module took multiple tries to implement
Two of us were familiar with node.js and software development, while it was the first time coding with node.js for our other 2 members.
It was our first time using the Open Data API.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We can ask Amazon Alexa about multiple ameneties of parks in Nashville.
We learned a lot about Open Data, javascript, and Alexa programming.
We see huge potential for this in other cities. It is as simple as changing the API links.

What we learned

We learned how to write Amazon Alexa skills, which we have never done before.

What's next for NODE (Nashville Open Data Explorer)

*We would like to implement cards, so that when you ask about a park, a card pushes a picture and an address to your phone

We would like to add more natural and parametrized utterances.
We want to see this implemented across other cities! The SODA API has data for other cities.
We want to be able to query the closest park. We have the proper Google Maps API, but did not have time to implement it.
Lastly, we would like to implement 2 slots per query.
We would like to add Alexa to wearables so you can ask about Nashville on the fly.

Built With

alexa-sdk
amazon-alexa
javascript
node.js
serverless
soda

Submitted to

VandyHacks IV

Created by

I helped mine the public art and parks data from the Nashville Open Data Portal using the Socrata Open Data API (SODA). This API allowed us to use in-line SOQL queries to filter data from the json file to answer user's requests. We compiled "intents" (requests that users could ask of Alex), utterances for how they could ask Alexa questions, corresponding queries to pull the appropriate data, and crafted her responses.

sarahlotspeich
Made AWS Lambda functions for Amazon Alexa skills. Made custom Alexa commands for querying Nashville government data.
Made a finite state machine for the states of our Alexa skill interface.

chasefarmer2808
I wrote multiple intents and utterances. I integrated the serverless framework into our workflow to optimize deployment times and testing. This was my first time using the SODA API, Alexa-sdk, AWS, and Amazon Developer.

timami
I helped with accessing the data via the Socrata Open Data API from publicly available datasets at data.nashville.gov to be queried within the NODE Alexa skill. This was my first time querying a json file through an API using SOQL. I assisted with compiling intents to be recognized by Alexa, as well as crafting her responses and menu selection phrases.

Hannah Weeks