Learning how crowdsourcing data could change the geospatial sector

Overview

The Geospatial Commission will invest up to £1.5 million in innovation projects. These will use crowdsourcing to create, update and maintain information related to geographic location, to make it more useful.

Scope

The aim of this competition is to find ways for users of a mapping app or website to take part in creating and/or maintaining geospatial datasets.

The Geospatial Commission’s main goal is to ensure data is useful by helping to make it more accurate, complete and available. The ideal solution would give service users the power to identify and correct any missing, out of date or wrong data.

Your proposal must demonstrate:

• which datasets you will work with and your proposed approach
• any potential intellectual property (IP) issues
• the main dependencies, assumptions and risks
• what economic benefit you expect to produce
• how much funding your partners will contribute
• why your contributors want to be involved
• how you will try to resolve issues around data integrity
• how your project can scale to deliver greater benefits

By the early 2020s your project must do at least one of these things:

• be available to help the owners or curators of datasets (or the service providers that use them) maintain their data
• give a world-leading consumer experience
• produce high value local jobs and UK supply chain opportunities
• create export opportunities for UK businesses
• improve data integrity at appropriate timescales (from hourly through to annual)
• help make the UK a leader in developing and exploiting geospatial data

Your project must focus on using crowdsourcing to support applications in one of the following 3 areas:

1. Improving the delivery of public services at the local authority level, such as parking or disabled access.
2. Working with third sector organisations to support improved social or environmental outcomes.
3. Enhancing existing public sector open datasets, such as a publicly accessible green space dataset.

Eligibility

To lead a project you must:

• be a UK based business, of any size, a research and technology organisation (RTO) or a local authority
• carry out at least 90% of your project work in the UK
• exploit the results from or in the UK
• involve the owner or curator, if there is one, of the dataset you will be working with

Projects with total eligible costs:

• under £100,000 can be single or collaborative
• £100,000 or more must be collaborative

To collaborate on a project you must be a UK based business, of any size, academic organisation, public sector organisation or research and technology organisation (RTO).

Funding Costs

The Geospatial Commission has allocated up to £1.5 million for this competition. It is expecting to fund projects with total eligible costs of between £50,000 and £750,000, including:

• up to 10 projects with total eligible project costs between £50,000 and £250,000
• at least 3 projects with total eligible project costs between £250,000 and £750,000

For feasibility studies and industrial research projects you could get funding for your eligible project costs of:

• up to 70% if you are a micro or small business
• up to 60% if you are a medium-sized business
• up to 50% if you are a large business

For experimental development projects which are nearer to market, you could get funding for your eligible project costs of:

• up to 45% if you are a micro or small business
• up to 35% if you are a medium-sized business
• up to 25% if you are a large business

Exclusions

Innovate UK will not fund projects that do not use crowdsourcing of geospatial data to contribute to the project aims.