Euronavigator
Executive Summary
A few years ago, Ukraine started the way of democratic transformation. At this point, Ukraine is going through the process of economic integration and political association with the EU. The Association Agreement requires the gradual implementation many the EU Normative legal acts in the Ukrainian legislation. Before the project execution, Ukrainian Centre for European Policy (UCEP) monitored the implementation process manually with little clarity. LaSoft offered UCEP a custom dashboard solution that automates data collection and representation. Today our solution save the time and efforts of UCEP employees and provides 100% of visibility to anyone with internet access.
We started working on the Euronavigator dashboard system to track the implementation of legislative acts for Ukraine`s realization of commitment according to the Association Agreement. Euronavigator aims to inform citizens about the execution requirements and develop the ability to monitor the progress towards realizing these requirements.
About the
company/client
The Ukrainian Centre for European Policy (UCEP) is an independent think-tank and advocacy group founded in 2015.
The group’s mission is to promote reforms in Ukraine to ensure democratic development, sustainable economic growth and implementation of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement, with a particular focus on the free trade area.
Activities:
- Preparing and dissemination of expert-analytical materials in order to promote reforms for implementation of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement;
- Promoting European values in Ukrainian society;
- Informing a society about the opportunities and advantages of a partnership with the European Union;
- Facilitation to increase economic, political and trading partnership between Ukraine and the EU;
- Informing the international community about challenges and achievements in implementing required reforms according to the Association Agreement.
CSS
JavaScript
The Challenge
Our highly-qualified team offered a unique solution and the client received an easy-to-use interface with the ability to search, filter and sort the data. It was decided to create a bot service (Scrapper) that helps to automate the processing of the Eurolex website to gather keywords for the future search of appropriate legal acts on the website of The Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine (Supreme Council).
Every day Scrapper checks the availability of new euro integration legal acts on the Verkhovna Rada web page. When new acts are detected Scrapper offers to add them to the EU database for future implementation tracking.
The Solution
The Administrative Panel and Interactive infographics.
Developer’s insight
The Backend application consists of 3 parts: a bot (a web crawler that allows automatical monitoring the EU and Ukrainian online legislative base, tracking and saving all changes), internal API (used to fill and edit data in the manual mode) and public API (provides users with real-time information about the status of implementation of Ukraine–European Union Association Agreement in infographic).
Working with a lot of data with many relations was quite challenging. We faced performance issues, which were resolved by database and caching query optimizations. By using Elasticsearch, we have provided our clients with an easy-searching experience. Capybara library helped us to create the bot which automated the process of data monitoring and analysis.
Designer’s insight
Regarding design, we faced the challenge of visualizing very complex data in the simplest possible way. Our target audience is very busy people who are overloaded with information. So our goal was to provide them with helpful information at first glance. In our design process, we used Sketch for visualization, Zeplin for collaboration with developers and Marvel for prototyping.
Client’s feedback
NGO “Ukrainian Centre for European Policy” started to cooperate with LaSoft almost a year and a half ago and appreciates its team’s invaluable support in developing of a back-end database and graphical interface for an analytical monitoring product “AA Navigator”. The creative technical and design solutions proposed by LaSoft team were the core inputs for re-launching and upgrading this analytical tool that is widely used today from the highest governmental level to ordinary citizens. They are interested in Ukraine’s European integration for comprehensive monitoring and assessment of the progress in implementing the Association Agreement between the EU and Ukraine.
Results
Our engineers and designers instantly drilled down to the vision and idea of the project. As a result, the client has received a user-friendly interface with comprehensive abilities for data processing.
Our solution gives impressively long-term customer advantages because the Association Agreement will be implemented from 2014 to 2025. Our solutions will be working out the process of implementing the Association Agreement for 8 years.
The ability to automate data processing and synchronize both application databases helped our client to save time and money as they are a nonprofit organization.
Check out Euronavigator