Vincenzo PatrunoA Bit of Nearly Everything

How can they be used and what we can do with Open Data? Probably no one better than, citizens, independent software developers, professionals, businesses and all data consumers can answer this question. And it ‘s because of this consideration that AppsForItaly, the Italian Open Data Competition was launched.

Remember that Open Data is (generally ) data produced and published on the Web by the Public Sector and where  reuse is allowed. To get an idea about Open Data in Italy, you can start from dati.gov.it, the national catalog of Open Data. It was launched a few months ago and it is now consolidating to become the ‘”entry point” of public data in Italy. Catalogs are also active as a regional portals. You can visit for instance dati.piemonte.it (the first public data portal in Italy) or dati.emilia-romagna.it. Statistics Open Data are released (in English, of course!) by the Italian Institute of Statistics on dati.istat.it, www.istat.it, demo.istat.it and other thematic web sites.

The aim of AppsForItaly is encouraging citizens to design Web applications, mobile apps, to create visualizations and infographics and  to design databases. Obviously not all people are specialists and therefore don’t have the necessary skills to do that. This is the reason why the competition also  includes the category “Ideas and Projects” where everyone who has a good idea or a project about how to use data can apply.

Is it worth it? You have to remember there  is € 30,000 in prizes provided by the Italian Ministry for Public Administration and Innovation, and  € 10,000 as well as prizes in technology and services  provided by official sponsors. And don’t forget that all proposals will be presented to companies,  communities, the market and  Public Administrations.

To do this, there is still three month’s time. The deadline for submitting proposals is in fact scheduled for Apr. 30th 2012.

All proposals received will be evaluated by a committee  while the event / award ceremony will take place during the first week of March. Stay tuned for all further updates!