On Friday, Marius Schwarz, project manager of the Nexus-​e project, held a keynote speech at the opening of the Energy Data Hackdays on three challenges for using energy data in academic research: the data does not exist, the use of available data is restricted, and the data is decentralized. He also pointed out a successful example for open energy data in Estland, where a datahub Estfeed is established to facilitate centralized data exchange and innovation.

Later, Xuqian Yan, project engineer of the Nexus-​e project, presented two challenges for the participants to choose from: energy data visualization and knowledge discovery from energy data. In the end, a team of 4 people from different domains with various specialties was formed to tackle the energy data visualization challenge.

On Saturday, after two days of intensive brainstorming and programming, the team successfully implemented and presented a new landing page as an entry to the current visualization tool of the Nexus-​e project, which provides the user an overview of crucial results. Besides, the team also made modifications within the framework of the current tool to improve user experience and to visualize more data.

The interdisciplinary team with members coming from IT, finance, and business backgrounds contributed greatly towards the fruitful discussion in the first stage of the challenge and the following successful implementation of the prototype. They brought different ideas from the aesthetic, usability, and practicability perspectives.