Cloud Data Rocks Out the Roskilde Festival

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.

10 days of infinite unknowns

A gateway to the geospatial

Information in motion

Real-time, operational decisions

Enter the data laboratory

The Roskilde Festival is “the perfect microcosm of a complex modern city.”1 It generates immense amounts of data, both structured and unstructured, generated from geospatial,

social media and a multitude of other sources.

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.2

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.

By making this wealth of data accessible to non-data scientists, the Festival gained insights enabling them tomake better decisions that can help minimize food waste, improve security, and optimize the festival experience.

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.

dashDBa managed data

warehousing platform, stored the data.

SoftLayer’s AutoScale service automatically

scaled the data.

SPSSan intuitive visual modeler,

cleaned and merged the data.

IBM Watson Analytics offered real-time analytics

for non-technical users.

Learn more about how IBM Cloud Data Services and CBS rocked the Roskilde Music Festival.

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1 Per Østergaard, Jacobsen, External Lector and Project Manager, “Copenhagen Business School drives sustainability at Roskilde Festival using cloud data analytics.” IBM. February 2016. Web. 2 Henrik, Hammer, Nordic Analytics Architect, IBM Analytics, “Applying Geospatial Analytics to Audience Behaviour.” December 2, 2015. Slideshare.