Winners of the Open Data competition Apps4Finland announced

Held for the third time, the Apps4Finland idea competition inspired citizens more actively than ever to develop new ways to utilise the open data reserves of public administration.

There were four categories in the competition: Idea, Application, Visualisation and Data categories.

First prize (€1000) in the Idea category was awarded to Tilannekuva.fi by Kari Hintikka. The concept describes a crisis communication service, which combines the crisis data of the authorities, open data sources, and citizen activity. Nelgrate Oy's ParkkiNappi was awarded as number one (€3000) in the Application category. It can be used to pay for a parking fee without coins and automatic meters. The Visualisation category was won (€2000) by Lauri Vanhala with his Helsinki Public Transport Visualized video, which shows how the public transport of the capital area awakes in the morning.

For the first time, an award for the best open-data-related action was handed out to an actor in the public sector. The award was granted to the Helsinki City Economic and Planning Centre work REST Interface of the Capital Region Service Map, which opens a large amount of data related to the capital region for application developers in an easy-to-use format.

In the private sector, first prize (€1000) went to the soRvi open data toolkit for R language by Leo Lahti and Juuso Parkkinen. It is a toolkit for data users, which aims to make the use and analysis of the data easier.

"Judging was an extremely interesting and inspiring process. The success of the competition is proof of the progress of open data in Finland and amongst application developers and authorities in making the data open," says Chairperson of the Jury, Jyrki J. J. Kasvi.

The idea competition Apps4Finland was now organised for the third time. In all, 140 competition entries were received, when last year there were 30. The competition was organised by the Finnish Association for Online Democracy and Forum Virium Helsinki.

Open data is also an important part of the design capital projects.