A public competition has been launched to boost the development of Oskari - a collection of map tools made available as open source by the National Land Survey of Finland. Interested software developers have until the end of this month to submit proposals for applications using Oskari or for improvements to the existing tools. National Land Survey of Finland will award EUR 3,000 to the best application and EUR 1,000 for the best concept. Two more prices, EUR 1,000 each, will go to the next best projects.
Last week, the National Land Survey of Finland also organised a hackathon to promote Oskari. “There were 7 participants, including representatives of government agencies, whom we helped getting started with Oskari development”, says Jani Kylmäaho, senior GIS expert at the survey’s Spatial Data Infrastructure department, ”considering that Oskari is not widely known, the event went very well.”
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Oskari is a set of easy-to-use tools to create geographic map applications. The toolbox provides a user interface, a server backend and, according to Oskari also tools for thematic mapping and spatial analysis. One example is the Finnish Geoportal Map Viewer.
National Land Survey of Finland hope that the Challenge’ will increase the uptake of the tools. They expect the contestants to propose improvements to make the interface easier to use, or come up with new ways to use the tools. Proposals have to be published on the GitHub software repository, including a licence that is compatible to Oskari’s EUPL and MIT.