Sixteen teams of young innovators spent the weekend building apps, websites and models and pitching their ideas to judges as part of the province’s first open data contest at Dalhousie University.

First place was awarded to Sunil Udhayakumar, Keerthana Mohan, Siddharth Thangharaj and Rasheed Andrews for using Crown land and weather data to create a model for determining the best places for wind turbines in Nova Scotia.

The second-place award was presented to Greg Horne, Gordon Campbell, Shahid Javed, Michael Nisbet and Tayo Adara for creating an app to help campers make the most of their experiences in provincial parks.

The following two teams tied for third place:
— Jabes Harris, Alif Momin, Zehao Ba, and Zhishen Yang created an app matching immigrants settling in Halifax Regional Municipality with the neighbourhood best suited to their personal and family needs
— Kanngi Mahajan, Raj Sonani, Shahriar Mullick Swapnil, Sanjeevi Ramachandran and Li Bo built a model to predict chemical composition of lake water and reduce the total cost of monitoring.

The People’s Choice Award went to an application that uses social media feeds to enrich the tourism experience for visitors. This award is selected by the participating teams.

Internal Services Minister Labi Kousoulis praised those who took part in the contest for applying creativity and ingenuity to the challenge.

“Our goal was to inspire youth to find new and interesting ways to use data to solve problems and create opportunities,” said Mr. Kousoulis. “They used our data to turn their ideas into innovative products and solutions that have the potential to benefit everyone.”

Nova Scotia launched its open data portal last year. The site gives free, easy access to nearly 400 data collections, including high-resolution 3D maps and some information previously only available for a fee. The pages have been viewed about 300,000 times and the data sets have been downloaded about 5,000 times.

The address is data.novascotia.ca.

Source: Release