When one of Denmark's smallest cities erupts into one of the largest as part of one of the world's most eminent music festivals, how does the town adapt? IBM, Roskilde Music Festival and The Copenhagen Business School (CBS) came together to gather and understand terabytes of data generated by the event to help make it one of the most efficient, sustainable, and enjoyable festivals in the world.
Ten days of infinite unknowns
The Roskilde Festival is "the perfect microcosm of a complex modern city." It generates immense amounts of data, both structured and unstructured, generated from geospatial, social media and a multitude of other sources.
Enter the data laboratory
To help gather, process, store, and analyze the Festival's data:
- The IBM Bluemix platform on the SoftLayer infrastructure—a cloud-based analytics environment—provided the backbone.
- dashDB, a managed data warehousing platform, stored the data.
- SPSS, an intuitive visual modeler, cleaned and merged the data.
- SoftLayer’s AutoScale service automatically scaled the data.
- IBM Watson Analytics offered real-time analytics for non-technical users.
A gateway of geospatial data
Festival goers opted-in via more than 60,000 smartphones to share information about their activities in real-time, and the behavior of the crowds was visualized in polygons and color-coded, time-lapsed animations—91 million rows of data was used to create 60 seconds of time-lapse.
Data in motion
Information took shape: The sale of food and average over time, the popularity of the various artists, the usage of bathroom facilities and parking, and so on created a comprehensive view of what was happening at the festival.
Real-time, operational decisions
By making this wealth of data accessible to non-data scientists, the Festival gained insights enabling better operational decisions that will minimize food waste, improve security, and optimize the festival experience.
"For one week each year, a small town
called Roskilde on the outskirts of
Copenhagen temporarily becomes
Denmark’s fourth largest city. The
renowned Roskilde Festival attracts
130,000 visitors annually, who camp out
and attend more than 170 live music and
cultural performances. During the ten-day
festival, the crowds buy and consume
approximately 200 tons of food and
generate 300 tons of waste.
There is growing international recognition
that mankind needs to make drastic
changes to meet the challenges we
face around climate change, a point
underscored at the 2012 “Rio+20” United
Nations conference on sustainable
development. Inspired by this conference,
researchers at the Copenhagen Business
School (CBS) wanted to do more than just
talk about sustainability. "Source : http://www.ibmbigdatahub.com/infographic/cloud-data-rocks-out-roskilde-festival
