Building apps with open data in India: An experience

Abstract

Open data is a well-established paradigm to make data available freely to everyone. The general belief is that open data leads to rapid pace in problem discovery, empowerment of citizens and greater collaborations. Opening up government data for free public access is a global trend, which India too followed in 2012. Though India is one of the early adopters, it has been ranked low in the last year's Open Data Index. We participated in an open data app contest conducted by Government of India to come up with societal applications based on the datasets provided in data.gov.in portal. We would like to share our experiences and challenges during this contest and compare them with a similar internal contest that we participated in, where datasets were from U.S.