Game of Code 2019 winners; Credit: Dominique Gaul

The team "Error 402 L" has won the fourth edition of the Digital Luxembourg open data challenge, held on 8 and 9 March 2019.

This year's Open Data Challenge took place during the "Game of Code" hackathon, which attracted some 140 coders from Luxembourg and abroad. The coders were challenged to develop innovative applications, services or visualisations using data made available as open data on the national portal- all within 24 hours. 

During the 2019 edition, the open data challenge focused around the theme "Hack to the future - investigate Yesterday's news". The "hackathoners", the majority of whom are developers and "data scientists" accepted the challenge to demonstrate that their creativity can have a positive impact on society.

On Saturday evening, each team had a three-minute slot to present the result of twenty-four hours of work during a "pitch" to the jury, as well as a 90-second session to answer questions. The jury then evaluated the innovative and creative nature of the idea as well as the quality of the achievement, in order to designate the winners.

Error 402 L ultimately won the 2019 challenge with its application "LibQuery" which allows the exploration of old newspaper articles made available as open data by the BnL. The app searches for the places mentioned in the article and displays them on a map. The second prize went to SAD Games for their advanced search engine for historical data, whilst the LUCA Group came third with their educational card game based on the data content of the BnL.

A special prize was awarded to the Saperlipopette team, which offered an elaborate search engine to obtain recommended documents.