SIR Platform

SIR (Sistema de Informação Residencial / Residential Information System) is a real estate data visualisation tool of the Portuguese market with over a decade of market data on statistical subjects. This is the reference real estate information database in Portugal.

SIR is achieved in a 3 stages process:

• Raw data is inserted into SIR Factory in order to deliver a data-cube
• Data Market statistics are then generated by a highly skilled team of Data Scientists from Confidencial Imobiliário
• The calculated statistics are delivered through SIR Platform in the form of customisable tables, cartograms, and graphs

A Confidencial Imobiliário é um databank independente, sendo a única fonte em Portugal com dados estatísticos sobre preços reais de transação, yields e contratos de arrendamento de imóveis residenciais, assim como quais os novos projetos imobiliários em carteira.

SIR Platform in a simplistic view is an exploration tool for a wide set of Data Mart subjects (23 and growing).  From the engineering standpoint a number of challenges where conquered, of which we highlight :

• Big Data modeling with Advanced Relational Database Modeling and indexing (over 150 Tables, some of which with well over 10 million records)
• Simplification of the Rest API (over 150 tables fully accessible from under 20 Rest API Endpoints)
• Highly configurable authorization mechanisms to allow for very segmented sales products
• Auto-Configurable User Interface, new subjects do no require front-end development and are deployed as soon as they get data.

In terms of technologies we highlight:

• Django, simplified the overall process and has been used since the very beginning in 2007 with version 0.96. This project grew together with Django itself, being upgraded to all the major breakpoints (1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.5, 1.8 LTS, 1.11 LTS, and finally 2.2 LTS)
• Postgres and Postgis, also used from the very beginning, due to the need for spatial data
• Django Rest Framework, the base of the new web frontend and client available API
• Sencha ExtJS is used in the frontend (the previous version was developed in PyQT and was used for over a decade until last year)