Forming Team Shankara

The Theme and Our Project

The hackathon’s theme was logistics, and we were tasked with solving a problem related to the use of open-source maps. The specific problem statement was to enable buyer and seller apps within ONDC’s ecosystem to use open-source maps for various e-commerce functionalities. This included creating polygons of points, generating motorable paths between two points, reverse-geocoding addresses to points on a map, computing motorable distances, and mapping points to polygons or paths interactively or using APIs. The solution also needed to support multiple representations of points, such as GPS coordinates, Google S2 cells, and Uber H3 cells....

Forming Team Shankara

Our team, Shankara, comprised four passionate individuals with diverse skill sets. We were excited about the challenge and eager to contribute to ONDC’s vision of democratizing the e-commerce space. The hackathon provided a unique opportunity to collaborate with like-minded innovators and leverage our collective expertise to create something meaningful....

Developing the Solution

To address the problem statement, we decided to use OpenStreetMap as the base for our open-source map solution. Our approach was to integrate various functionalities required for e-commerce using a combination of existing open-source tools and custom-developed algorithms....

Challenges and Overcoming Them

One of the main challenges we faced was ensuring the accuracy and efficiency of our map-related functionalities. Open-source maps can sometimes lack the precision of commercial alternatives, so we had to meticulously test and validate our implementations. Additionally, integrating multiple APIs and ensuring seamless interaction between them required rigorous debugging and optimization....

Outcome and Reflections

After countless hours of coding, testing, and collaboration, we successfully developed a functional prototype that met the hackathon’s requirements. Our solution allowed buyer and seller apps within the ONDC ecosystem to effectively utilize open-source maps, providing them with essential e-commerce functionalities while keeping costs low....