Today In History

Architecture

Inspiration

We visit many places, we know very less about the historic events or the historic places around us. Today In History notifies you of historic places near you so that you do not miss them.

What it does

Today In History notifies you about important events that took place exactly on the same date as today but a number of years ago in history. It also notifies the historical places that are around you along with the distance and directions. Today In History is also available as an Amazon Alexa skill. You can always ask Alexa, "Hey Alexa, ask Today In History what's historic around me? What Happened Today? What happened today in India.......

How we built it

We have two data sources: one is Wikipedia -- we are pulling all the events from the wiki for the date and filter them based on users location. We use the data from Philadelphia to fetch the historic places nearest to the user's location and used Mapquest libraries to give directions in real time.

Challenges we ran into

Alexa does not know a person's location except the address it is registered with, but we built a novel backend that acts as a bridge between the web app and Alexa to keep them synchronized with the user's location.

Built With

Submitted to

PennApps XIV
- Winner FINRA 1st place

Created by

I worked on agggregating the historic places data and visualization on the map using leaflet and got the directions using the mapquest directions API

Sumanth Reddy Pandugula
I worked on the Material Design UI interface, inspired by Google's design language for Polymer and the principles of progressive web applications.

Aniruddh Iyengar
I wrote the backend NodeJS application for data aggregation, along with create the AWS Lambda backend for handling of custom Amazon Alexa requests.

Anthony Topper

Updates

Sumanth Reddy Pandugula started this project — Sep 11, 2016 04:55 AM EDT

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