Puja Altas: An Open Map for Durga Puja Hopping

Pujo Atlas is a web-based tool designed to help people discover and plan visits to Durga Puja pandals in Kolkata and across West Bengal. Created as part of the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge, the app consolidates data from both a Kolkata puja guide and a government puja directory, presenting a unified view for exploration.

Visitors can search for pandals using various criteria such as names, locations, coordinates, or DIGIPIN codes. The app displays results on a clustered map and allows users to save their chosen pandals to a hopping list for planning their visit. This eliminates the need to switch between spreadsheets, map searches, and handwritten lists.

Pujo Atlas is currently a free, community-facing project without any paying users or revenue. The app's source code is available on GitHub, allowing anyone to view, inspect, adapt, and extend it as needed. The default map used is OpenStreetMap, which requires no API key, while the government directory, about 12 MB in size, is loaded on demand.

The app's datasets, stored in the "data" folder, include "pujo_atlas_plan_city.json" containing Kolkata Puja Guide records and "pujo_atlas_plan_government.json" holding the government directory information. Note that president names and contact numbers have been removed from the government directory records for privacy reasons. Any location outside West Bengal's map boundaries is omitted from the map.

The app's development utilized HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript, with Leaflet rendering the OpenStreetMap view and Supercluster grouping dense sets of pandal markers. The app fetches its JSON data, requiring the folder to be served over HTTP rather than opening the index.html directly. To run the application, navigate to the project folder and execute the command "python -m http.server 8000", then open "http://localhost:8000" in a web browser.

The app was built without using an open-weight model or an open-source AI agent framework, nor with local inference. Open-source AI is not currently a core component of the project, so it does not meet the challenge's central technical requirement. However, the app demonstrates the potential of open mapping tools and data, providing searchable maps and planning features in a browser-based platform without relying on a proprietary map service.