Crowdsource your way through OneMap

23 May 2012 – The latest innovative use of OneMap (http://www.onemap.sg/) is a set of map-based tools to facilitate ‘crowd-sourcing’ where Non Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and Voluntary Welfare Organisations (VWOs) can gather location-based information from the public through their websites.

2. The Cat Welfare Society (CWS) will be the first organisation to use the tool to put OneMap on its website for its members and general public to contribute information such as the location of stray cats sighted, with text, pictures or videos. Beyond information gathering, such crowd-sourcing through OneMap is seen as a community building tool by the CWS for its members and the public can start discussions about caring for community cats in their neighbourhoods and for volunteers to connect with others near them.

3. Ms Veron Lau, President of the CWS, says, “The crowd-sourcing tool by OneMap is a powerful instrument to collect information, especially for orgnisations that lack resources such as the CWS. We will be better able to connect with people who care about cats in big and small ways. We hope cat lovers and the public out there can do their bit in helping to share information about the community cats in their neighbourhoods. It would be very interesting to see how crowd-sourced information can lead to crowd-motivated positive action”.

4. NGOs and VWOs, as well as other organisations, are welcome to use the OneMap crowdsourcing tool. There have been suggestions for the tools to be used for crowd-sourcing the location of bird-sighting among bird-watchers, or even for the general public to rates public toilets that can be location-tagged using OneMap.

5. In the Government’s bid to promote the Geospatial industry, OneMap aims to spur innovation by facilitating and promoting the use of geospatial information across the public, private and people sectors by enabling them to tap on OneMap’s advanced web mapping technologies to create useful and value-added location-based services on the OneMap portal and within their own websites.

Information on businesses and properties

6. OneMap has successfully gathered 28 public agencies to provide 50 information themes and 29 services. The latest service on OneMap is BizQuery. This new service allows the public to search spatially for information on companies and businesses registered with the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority (ACRA) on OneMap. Using this service, business owners can get an overview of the business landscape in their vicinity. BizQuery can help customers in their search for specific businesses. Users can also choose to link up to i-shop@ACRA, a one-stop business services portal where they can purchase more detailed business information directly.

7. Since its launch in 2010, OneMap has been providing a host of services and functions that allow users to search and navigate intelligently for a wide range of innovative applications and services using geospatial information. It also offers a common map platform for public agencies to share and publish location-based information and services, including opportunities for anyone to create innovative geospatial applications by using OneMap and its application programming interfaces (APIs).

OneMap Challenge

8. The SLA launched the OneMap Challenge in December last year to provide a platform for application developers to showcase their creativity and to facilitate collaborations between potential business partners to create location-based apps that can benefit business enterprises and the general community.

9. The Challenge, which closed on 9 March 2012, received entries from educational institutions, businesses and members of the public on a variety of interesting applications. Participants were strongly encouraged to tap on some 50 layers of theme data contributed by various public agencies on OneMap as well as the datasets on http://www.data.gov.sg/. Please refer to Annex A for the list of winners.

10. Attesting to its success, OneMap has garnered international recognition and received awards such as the Esri Special Achievement in GIS (2010), Map Asia GeoSpatial Excellence Award (2010), URISA Exemplary Systems in Government (2010), Stockholm Challenge Finalist in Public Administration (2010) and e27 Asia Top 50 Apps Best Design of the Year for Pocket OneMap (2010) that was developed by NYP.

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Issued by:
The Singapore Land Authority
23 May 2012

ANNEX A

The winning entries are: