The American Geophysical Union's annual fall meetings are an exercise in information overload, with many thousands of sessions, presentations and other data to sift through. Now, after a contest to create navigation tools, it's easier to find your way through all the material.

Contestants used AGU's application program interface (API), a tool for building software applications, to access nonpersonal data from three previous meetings as well as the 2017 meeting, which will take place Dec. 11-15 in New Orleans.

In the first Open API Challenge, two Oregon data scientists took the top prize of $15,000 with the AGU Explorer (http://apiprojects.agu.org/project3/). Husband and wife team Bennett Battaile and Meenakshi Rao visualized the data in several ways: a world map shows the country of all authors; graphics show the connections among authors; and nested pie charts allow people to drill down through meeting year, programs, sessions and specific abstracts.

Second and third place finalists won $10,000 and $5,000 respectively.

The data "wasn't very easy to search," said Rick Murnane, head challenge judge and AGU meetings chair, in an article for AGU's news platform Eos. Contestants "moved beyond what they had in existing apps and leveraged it to their needs." http://bit.ly/2k53wwI

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