We are proud to be a Lead Sponsor for the Open Data Challenge being coordinated by Jonathan Gray from the Open Knowledge Foundation and Paul Meller from the Open Forum Academy, under the auspices of the Share PSI initiative.

This is a significant competition, with significant prizes totalling €20,000 for ideas, applications, visualisations and datasets – up to €5,000! 

As you would expect from a Talis Sponsored competition, Linked Data features in the line up of attributes that entrants should be considering.   Following the 5 Star Data principles espoused by Sir Tim Bereners-lee, the more machine readable, non-proprietary formatted, and linked that Open Data can be, the lower is the barrier to its innovative use.   This is especially true in the area of Public Sector Information, with similar or associated data is being published by several organisations or governments.  In recognition of this we are, as part of our sponsorship, backing the Talis Award for Linked Data – €1,000 presented for the best use of Linked Data in any of the competition categories.

The competition will run for 60 days, so get your ideas flowing, and developers fingers rattling over those keys.

Watch out for a later post, when I will  identify some Linked Open Data that is already available that you could use to build an entry.