UIUC Events is a hub for all sorts events happening within the Urbana-Champaign area. A problem that I have encountered is that there are so many great events happening around UIUC, but the information about them is very fragmented. UIUC Events is a Flask server that solves this problem by gathering event data from a variety of sources and using the MeTA toolkit to search and group events.
When the server is first run, the app scrapes event data from a wide selection of sources and assembles the necessary MeTA data files and Event objects. The data is parsed from either downloadable calendar files (.ics) using the Python library icalendar, or through scraping the pages actual HTML using the Python library BeautifulSoup. It then creates forward and inverted indexes in order to allow searching with an Okampi BM25 ranking function, as well as running a latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) generative model to group events into topics, regardless of their source. The app then generates HTML pages using this data. Users can browse upcoming events, search for a specific event, and see similar events to ones that they've found.
Event data is pulled from:
When setting up the project locally, create a virtual environment to run the server.
pip install --upgrade pip
virtualenv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txtIn order to leave the virtual environment, simply close your terminal or type
deactivate.
To run the server,
python server.py config.tomlThis will generate the necessary event data and save it to MeTA compatible files. If you have run the server previously and want to use the same data, simply run
python server.py config.toml --generate_events=falseFrom there, simply go to localhost:5000 in your browser to use the app!
The Flask routes/URLs are as follows:
- '/' - The main homepage. Shows all upcoming events sorted by their date.
- '/about' - Just some simple information about the service.
- '/search' - A page that shows search results after using the search bar at any page.
- '/event/{id}' - Each event's page that gives their overview, link to the source, and shows all similar modeled events.