Project Nimbus Is The Data Marketplace

App developers and innovators face major difficulties when accessing data they can use in their phone apps or devices. They would have to figure out, for instance, how to access weather forecast data from the National Environmental Agency, or movie timings from the various cinemas. This tedious process is costly and complicated, detracting innovators from their creative process.

This is where Project Nimbus comes in. They aim to create a one stop shop where content creators can easily share their information in a marketplace, and where developers can access different kinds of data they can use in their apps or devices.

Two years ago, we first profiled Project Nimbus when it just began. Today, there are more datasets and projects that have used these datasets. An example of an app made with the help of Project Nimbus is SG pedia, which provides information on places of interest in Singapore:

For a short 39s video introduction to Project Nimbus:

Content creators can rely on the technical expertise provided by Project Nimbus at no upfront cost, while innovators too can sample some of the datasets free of charge.

This initiative is started by a group of volunteer technology professionals with funding from corporate and government sponsors.

So far, their list of datasets has incorporated a wide variety of sources. Here’s a sampling: Restaurant information from HungryGoWhere, road conditions from the Land Transport Authority, catalogue information from the National Library Board, and places of interest from the Singapore Tourism Board.

Innovators looking for a dataset that is not featured on Project Nimbus can even vote for the information that they would like too see featured. The volunteers would then act on their behalf and request for it from the relevant organisations every few weeks.

Developers who want to get involved can register on the website. They can then review the datasets that are available, and access the code snippets and tutorials. The datasets are based on the Open Data Protocol, and are available for use in Java, .NET, PHP and Ruby.

For a video introduction as to how Project Nimbus works: