FlatTurtle Blog
8 July 2012, 00:00
](http://flatturtle.com/)
Since open data is becoming more and more popular we can start developing our own
creative applications using that data. FlatTurtle does exactly that. It is a
system that has a special turtle for each type of data. There is a turtle that
likes train data, there is one that likes airplane data and there is a turtle
that likes twitter. Combine all of these turtles together and you get a nice
visualisation of that data.
If you are the owner of a building that attracts a lot of people and you want to inform your visitors of what is going on around this area, you can put all of these turtles on a nice big screen. Data about public transport, twitter mentions, weather perils, and so on, suddenly become the hot spot of your building.
Pieter Colpaert en Bart Rosseau study the FlatTurtle screen at iRail Summer of code.
Future
You like these turtles, and you want to play with them? No problem, soon there
will be a mobile application to control all the turtles on the screen. Say you
want to see what the weather forecast will be for the next hours, with the
touch of a button you can call a turtle that will display this information on
the screen.
How?
iRail loves API’s so why not create one ourselves. Everything you do on the
mobile application sends messages to our Control Bay telling it what you want
to do. Our Control Bay will then translate your command and send it to the
right screen.
The team
* [Jens Segers](https://twitter.com/jenssegers)
* [Nik Torfs](http://www.linkedin.com/in/niktorfs)
* [Glenn Bostoen](https://twitter.com/glennbostoen)