On 8th and 9th March 2019 the 4th edition of Digital Luxembourgs Open Data challenge took place during the Game of Code Hackathon at the campus Geesseknäpchen in Luxembourg. This year the challenge was organised by Digital Luxembourg together with the National Library of Luxembourg (BnL) and focused on historical newspaper data from the 19th century. Teams were challenged to use digitized newspaper data and create new visual interfaces, processing tools and machine learning applications that could benefit the general public or researchers. The challenge was not easy and required solid technical and data science skills. 5 teams out of 34 in total decided to compete and did an impressive work during those 24 hours.
During the Hackathon, the IT specialists of BnL were available to support the teams and provide any technical help related to the processing of library data and the understanding of its format. Not only did the teams take advantage of this opportunity, but this also allowed both the jury and the BnL to gather valuable feedback for the future. Finally, the jury had the delicate task to choose the winners among 5 passionate teams and the result is as follows:
1st Price: Project “LibQuery” of the team “Error 402 – Banque de Luxembourg”, showcased a beautifully working user interface where users can search articles related to war and politics that are linked to a specific city and period. The solution made use of full text classification techniques as well as linking of author’s biographies to the Luxembourg Autorenlexikon.
2nd Price: Project “Hacktron” of the team “Sad Games – Docler Holding”, demonstrated a search engine as well as valuable data processing results that can provide search suggestions and content statistics.
3rd Price: Project “LU-CA” of the team “LUCA - ARHS Cube”, created a family friendly and educational card game using digitized newspapers.
A special price has been given to the team “Saperlipopette – PwC Luxembourg”, for their great implementation of natural language processing algorithms, recommendation system and search engine.
Last, but not least, the team “Neofacto Tyler – Neofacto” has been awarded with a consolation price for their dedication and interesting linked-data application between BnL’s data and the data of the National Library of France (BnF).
