Innovative ideas for using and sharing government information in New South Wales have been recognised with $100,000 in prize money. An application that allows users to overlay Australian demographic information onto a map and a mashup that compares and contrasts Australian suburbs were the joint first place winners in the Apps4NSW mashup competition.
Winners of competition, which aims to find new and useful ways to deliver government information to the public via the internet and mobile devices, were announced by Jodi McKay, NSW Minister for Science and Medical Research.
“Applications and ideas that allow people to access and compare information about their local communities were the big winners,” McKay said.
The competition attracted 122 entries and was broken into three categories: best applications, best ideas and best student ideas. McKay said that the judging panel based their decisions on each application’s usefulness and interface design, the quality of the app, originality and potential as an ongoing resource.
Entries included applications for reuse of the State’s historic and scientific collections, public transport feedback, a pollution reporting tool and boundaries of school catchment areas.
Brad Spencer’s winning mashup, DemographicDrapes, allows users to apply data from the ABS 2006 Census to analyse different demographic themes such as age, housing, marriage and religion.
“This really does provide the remote web user with an affordable analysis tool that both allows them to conveniently access publicly published demographics as well as integrate their own, more private, data sets,” Spencer said.
The other first place mashup, ‘Suburban Trends’, allows users to compare attributes such as socio-economic standing, education levels and perceived safety levels for NSW suburbs. The app was developed by Smart Mashups.
The first place winning app teams each were awarded $15,000. McKay said that the NSW government would also be identifying relevant applications and ideas that could attract $50,000 in development funding.
