Muscat, JUNE 8 - Complementing efforts in the development of a digital society and eGovernment in the Sultanate, the Information Technology Authority (ITA) held a ceremony to honour the winners of the Oman Open Data Competition. The event was held under the auspices of Dr Salim bin Sultan al Ruzaiqi, CEO of ITA. The competition produced 10 projects with innovative ideas and practical applications that can be used commercially and socially. Three winning projects were selected based on jury evaluation (75 per cent weight) and a public vote (25 per cent weight).
The first prize of RO 2,000 went to Shopping Facilitator, an online app which connects the appropriate consumables available in the various consumer centres in the market. It makes it easy for users to search for the goods they want to buy and allows them to compare prices and give them the best shopping centre in terms of price or location based on the user’s choice.
InvestGo, which came in second and received RO 1,500, is an app that helps users secure suitable investment opportunities for each investor so as to provide easy and quick methods in analysing data to invest by region, location and available services.
In third place, with a prize amount of RO 1,000, was Sakani, an app that can help university/college students to find the most convenient accommodation as quickly as possible as well as showing the nearest services needed by students in and around the college such as transportation stations, health centres and restaurants.
Oman Open Data Competition is an online competition, which allows participants to work virtually while being engaged through workshops as a checkpoint for follow up support.
It targeted individuals with expertise in various areas like design, development, entrepreneurship and engineering.
It focuses mainly on encouraging participants to come up with an idea for using open data provided by government agencies to find solutions to the challenges related to different sectors such as: Education and Employment, Tourism, logistics, housing, Public Health, Agriculture and Fisheries and Energy and environment.
The number of participants in the competition reached 223 and was distributed into 39 teams. 19 of them were qualified to meet the jury committee, and the committee selected 10 teams, qualified for the final stage.
Open Data is data that can be accessed, reused, and redistributed by anyone, for any purposes, including commercial reuse, free of charge and without any restrictions.
Open Data refers to datasets that are held in organisational databases.
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