Open public data made accessible and utilized

Helsinki Region Infoshare will make open regional data easy to find and use. The Apps4Finland 2010 competition has been completed and winners announced.

Helsinki Region Infoshare is a project that makes statistical data on the region available for the general public free of charge. The project has launched a new web service. At this stage, the service’s web site contains general information about the service.

The service will offer an easy and accessible way to locate and utilize open public data. The data is mainly statistical information on living conditions and welfare, the economy, labor market and transport.

By opening the data and making it easily available, the providers of the service want to offer it for use in innovative ways: the data can be used as a tool in decision-making, and it can be used to develop new applications and services.

According to plan, the service will be fully operational in 2012, when it will already contain a large amount and diverse data on the region and its various players.

Helsinki Region Infoshare is a joint project by the cities of Helsinki, Espoo, Vantaa and Kauniainen, as well as the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra. The service is maintained by the City of Helsinki Urban Facts and Forum Virium Helsinki, a non-profit company that creates digital services for consumers and clients in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area.

Helsinki Region Infoshare 

Apps4Finland – new web applications through competition

Apps4Finland is a competition for developers and designers of web applications, intended to create new ways to utilize open data of the public sector. Apps4Finland also seeks to promote discussion about the concept of opening up of public databases.

The organizers of the competition want to advance the emergence of new ideas and collaboration between citizens and public organizations. The main organizer is Suomen Verkkodemokratiaseura, an association whose mission is to improve Internet democracy. The project is supported by Forum Virium Helsinki.

Apps4Finland 2010 is the second edition of this competition, which was first organized last year. This year’s winners were announced in connection of the MindTrek digital media conference in Tampere, Finland, on October 7.

The competition is divided into two main categories: Implementation (Agencies and Indies respectively) and Ideas.

The winner of the Implementation/Agencies prize is DataSuomi.fi for a new channel to publish community-based and combined open data in the semantic Web, together with a search engine.

The winner of the Implementation/Indie prize is “Parliament interface” – a voting and visualization service which makes voting results accessible for application development and presents the results in an easy-to-read format.

The winner of the ideas prize is LiveInfoBoard, an idea for a service that combines the information of all rail service display boards and makes it available on the Internet and mobile devices. 

Apps4Finland