The Peak of Data and AI 2025 offered more than educational sessions and networking opportunities: it gave attendees a chance to flex their creative muscles and explore FME’s capabilities in a fast-paced, one-evening Hackathon. Here are the projects that emerged from this fun event.
See also: 7 things you might have missed at the Peak of Data and AI 2025
Capital City Rock Tour
The first team wowed the audience with an inspired project that blended geography, generative AI, and music. From a list of conference attendees’ countries, they used FME and ChatGPT to determine the latitude and longitude of each country’s capital, generate a KML output, and generate an actual rock song about each country. The result was a rich KML file that displayed each capital on a map, accompanied by a poem and a rock song about that country.
- FME Power Moves: Connecting to ChatGPT, a music generation API, JSON flattener for processing responses, and creative KML balloon styling to embed audio and lyrics. A timestamp delay was implemented to wait between API calls, allowing the generated songs to finish before retrieval. The team used ArcGIS Earth to showcase the final product.
- The Result: A global music tour with synchronized geographic data and audio—yes, a literal rock tour of the world.
Historical Parks Explorer
This team tapped into OpenStreetMap data to explore parks in the Seattle area and their historical significance. Using OpenAI and FME, they generated descriptive summaries for each park and visualized the results.
- FME Power Moves: Bounding box generation, Overpass Turbo API querying, and JSON manipulation to map and analyze parks. The team used ChatGPT to generate historical context for each park.
- The Result: Easy and insightful discoveries about various parks in the area.
Space Needle Lizard
This team built a creative visualization showing where attendees traveled from, turning global attendee data into a stylized HTML report. The HTML app featured dynamic flag visuals overlaid across U.S. geometry and a custom world map background with randomized colors.
- FME Power Moves: Connecting to ChatGPT, Mapnik, and HTML generation. The team tiled flags of 25 countries across a U.S. map using affine transformations and clipping techniques.
- The Result: A nice visual showing where attendees traveled from, with a tiled map of flags. As potential future improvements, they proposed using real-time flight data and FME’s new Data Visualization features.
ArcGIS Online Cost Cutter
This highly practical project tackled a common enterprise challenge: reducing costs on ArcGIS Online by identifying under-utilized or storage-heavy items.
- FME Power Moves: Authenticated against ArcGIS Online, used REST APIs to gather user and item data, and visualized it through FME’s new virtualization tools. ChatGPT was used to query the data, enabling natural-language questions like “Which items consume the most credits?” They used JSON templating in FME to create GPT-readable outputs.
- The Result: An efficient, AI-powered dashboard that empowers organizations to manage GIS storage and usage costs intelligently.
Geo Haiku Generator
Merging art and data, this team generated haikus for random cities around the world based on current weather conditions. They used two ChatGPT prompts: one for finding cities, the other for haiku generation. The final visualization used standard Power BI tooltips and map interactivity.
- FME Power Moves: API integrations for city data and weather, combined with ChatGPT prompts to generate haikus in the traditional 5-7-5 format.
- The Result: An HTML report and PowerBI map dashboard showcasing city names, weather, and poetic musings. This was a great lighthearted but technically robust example of combining geospatial data with creative storytelling!
Wrapping It Up
Voting was done live via QR code, with the Capital City Rock Tour winning the People’s Choice Award by a large margin. A tie in the judges’ vote resulted in a shared Best Overall Project award between them and the ArcGIS Online Cost Cutter.
Our very tough Hackathon judges
The Hackathon truly showcased the brilliance of our user community. From poetic geography to cost-saving insights, each project was innovative and unique.
Congratulations to all the participants! The teams’ energy and creativity made this event a memorable one!
As always, we invite you to share your creative FME projects on the FME Community! We are always doing fun activities there, and it’s a great way to connect with others who are using FME in creative ways.
