We set out to conduct a social experiment of sorts, to host a hackathon to hack streaming BGP data. We had no idea we would get such an enthusiastic reaction from the community and that we would reach capacity. We were pleasantly surprised at the response to our invitations when 25 experts came to interact with 50 researchers and practitioners (30 of whom were graduate students). We felt honored to have participants from 15 countries around the world and experts from companies such as Cisco, Comcast, Google, Facebook and NTT, who came to share their knowledge and to help guide and assist our challenge teams.

Having so many domain experts from so many institutions and companies with deep technical understanding of the BGP ecosystem together in one room greatly increased the kinetic potential for what we might accomplish over the course of our two days.

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When visualizing the Internet, one can consider several different levels of abstraction, including the Internet Protocal (IP) address, router, and Autonomous System (AS) levels. IP addresses identify interfaces on devices that connect to the Internet. Routers are devices that route traffic by accepting it on one interface and forwarding it out another interface. (Routers may have many interfaces.) An Autonomous Systems (AS) is a set of IP addresses operated under a single administrative umbrella. The three granularities are illustrated below:

Most Internet mapping methods have focused on characterizing and modeling network structure at the level of interconnected Autonomous Systems (ASes). We have developed different ways to annotate ASes, using a variety of available datasets, to support visualizations of AS topology:
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I gave a class lecture at UCSD in January 2016 on visualizing Internet AS topology. I also prepared a supplemental data set to facilitate student exploration and experimentation. Comments and feedback welcome!