PR - A government-led competition, to find ground-breaking ideas for the sharing of public information, is getting a boost from Britain’s national mapping agency. Organisers of the Show Us A Better Way contest looked for entries demonstrating how government information can be made more useful and accessible to the public. The winner, a website called ‘Can I recycle it’, is designed to help people locate their nearest recycling centres. To help bring this pioneering information resource to life, Ordnance Survey is offering development support – as well as providing its world-renowned mapping data.

‘Congratulations to this very worthy winner,’ says Ordnance Survey Director, Peter ter Haar.  ‘Can I recycle it?’ is an excellent example of how combining geographic information with additional data can provide an innovative and powerful tool – to benefit the entire community,’ says Ordnance Survey Director, Peter ter Haar.

‘Recycling is a key activity – on both environmental and economic grounds – and is supported by government and the public-at-large. People can potentially use this website to locate their nearest recycling centres quickly and easily – and we are very keen to give the developers all the support they need to make it a huge success.’                                                                                                     

This year, Ordnance Survey launched OS OpenSpace – a free experimental service providing a rich web API allowing access to a range of spatial data. It allows others the freedom to innovate using geographic information – with confidence in the national consistency and currency of the data they use.

 

‘As well as full access to OS OpenSpace, we are offering the winners of this competition hands-on development support; the expertise of our marketing, press and public relations teams; and workshops to help them achieve the full potential of this superb initiative.’