Mapping + Public data = Ideal Government prize competition! Submit entries by end August!

WRITTEN ON July 15th, 2005 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Design: Co-creation, Online Maps, What do we want?

Put publicly available UK data on the map and win a you-centric geographical prize!

I’m delighted to announce the first ever Ideal Government prize competition.

To win the prize, hack together some government data with a free online map, and send a short description and a link to Ideal Government during July or August. Show us what’s possible in terms of locating public-sector data (schools, crimes, hazardous waste dumps, high-spending councils, whatever) on maps as easy to use as Google.

The best service in the opinion of the judges wins. Any copyright material remains the (c) of the licence holders – I expect it will all be (cc) or public domain anyway. So if you’re crafty enough to link UK public service data with an online map…show us what’s possible! Help connect Whitehall with the online underworld!

Five lucky winners will each receive a personalised full-scale full-sized Ordnance Survey map (Explorer or Landranger) centred on your home or anywhere you want in Britain. These specially prepared OS Select map prizes are kindly donated by Ordnance Survey.*

Don’t delay! Hack a public service data map today! Details below, and some links to get you going on the sidebar.* Thanks to Vanessa Lawrence at Ordnance Survey

Results will be posted to Ideal Government. Judges decision is final. “Best” means taking into account the elegance of the service and how useful, original or interesting it is. No cash alternative. Endless correspondence will be entered into – that’s what this blog is about.

7 Responses to “Mapping + Public data = Ideal Government prize competition! Submit entries by end August!”

Alistair Rutherford wrote on July 19th, 2005 12:45 pm :

I guess I might as well get the ball rolling.

http://www.gTraffic.info uses data provided by the BBC and the Highways Agency (this is a gov agency so I suppose it counts). The HA provides roadworks and motorway message signs through their QMISS XML feed.

Paul Maunders wrote on July 21st, 2005 1:00 pm :

http://www.world-airport-codes.com/uk-top-20-airports.html containts a list of the UK’s top airports, with each airports location plotted on a google map. Click on the airport names to go through to the map page.

Ben O'Neill wrote on July 21st, 2005 8:54 pm :

http://tinyurl.com/7kl6u — uses Google Maps and BBC news stories to plot the last 12 hours of news on a map of the UK.

Pete Zaborszky wrote on July 22nd, 2005 1:09 am :

This example shows the most expensive roads (by average sale price over the last 2 years) in the UK plotted on a Google Map. On this particular page you can see roads in Knightsbridge (make sure you click the view map link as they don’t show by default). We also have maps like this for every other town in the country, just click on the House Price Statistics link at the bottom of the page.

Pete Zaborszky wrote on July 22nd, 2005 1:12 am :

Sorry, I forgot to post the url in the above comment, they should be:

http://www.ourproperty.co.uk/stats/sw7.html

and

http://www.ourproperty.co.uk/stats.html

Remember to click the “Show Map” links when you get to the town you are interested in.

William Heath wrote on July 22nd, 2005 12:32 pm :

Olly Jackson writes:

I’m tempted to do something for this, sounds interesting. One problem though, anyone know what data is actually available online? I’ve found
http://www.neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk/dissemination/ but it has horrible, horrible javascript redirect stuff which does not bode well for scraping data.

Olly