Acadia students place third in Open Data Contest

For Immediate Release - Halifax, NS

Seventeen teams spent the weekend building apps, models and other innovations as part of the province's second annual open data contest at Dalhousie University in Halifax.

The top prize was awarded to Daniel Arantes, Rodolfo Garcia, Mohannad Hameed, Jennifer LaPlante and Duane Malone for using immigration and population data to build an app helping immigrants to Nova Scotia find communities and networks based on their interests.

Cory MacRae and Priyanka Kochhar earned second place for their analysis of long-term care in Nova Scotia using census and waitlist data.

Third place went to Acadia University students Ryan Gorringe, Keara Leibovitz and Yuanyuan Shi who analyzed groundwater and climate change data to predict severity of flood seasons across Nova Scotia.

Teams voted for their favorite innovation and selected Chris Adams' app determining how road closures affect traffic patterns to receive the People's Choice Award. The app uses boundary and road network data to create an interactive, visual tool.

The team of Benjamin DeLong and Stewart Rand received honourable mention for their app created using Crown land, wildlife management and hunting license vendor data to show hunters what game can be hunted when and where.

Internal Services Minister Patricia Arab congratulated the teams for using data from Nova Scotia's open data portal to create opportunities or tackle problems in new and interesting ways.

"Data in the hands of curious and creative people spurs innovation - and that benefits everyone," said Ms. Arab. "The teams went above and beyond when we asked them to show us what was possible. I am impressed by the products and solutions created using open data."

The portal has been continually updated since it was launched in 2016. There are more than 670 data collections and views publicly available, including some information previously only available for a fee. The data is in easy-to-work-with formats so everyone can use and share it to discover something new.

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