The city government made 350 data sets available from more than 40 city agencies and commissions, according to the New York City Economic Development Corp. About 190 data sets were available for the inaugural BigApps contest last year. The data is available to the public on the city’s DataMine website.
“As the NYC DataMine continues to grow, the public continues to demonstrate its technical expertise and ingenuity in designing applications for New Yorkers,” said Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications Commissioner Carole Post in a statement. “I encourage everyone to vote for their favorite applications today.”
Software designers of the open source applications, which mash up the government data, are competing for $20,000 in prize money. Votes may be cast at nycbigapps.com through March 9. Winners will be announced next month. The first- and second-place submissions as chosen by the public will receive $2,500 and $1,500 respectively.
The rest of the prize purse will be divided among 12 more awards that will be chosen by a selection committee.
This year’s contest open submissions to any kind of software application, such as Web, a personal computer, a mobile handheld device, short message service, or any software platform broadly available to the public.
Last year’s winner was Bookzee, “a library book search application that allows users to enter a book title or author to find the nearest library currently holding it;” and NYC Way, “a one-stop location-based platform that bundles over 50 categories of information, including restaurants, nightlife, public restrooms, transit, traffic and tourist attractions into a single app.”
BigApps is co-sponsored by the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications and the New York City Economic Development Corp. The contest is administered by website ChallengePost.
