The Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) is inviting companies or consortia to propose innovative services enabled by mashups involving geospatial contents from the public, private and people (3P) sectors.

Issuing the Request for Information (RFI), an IDA spokesperson said, “Information underpins a growing part of an economy and the emergence of web 2.0 tools has allowed people to use, re-use and create information in new ways. When enough people come together to collect, re-use and distribute information, people organise around it in new ways, creating new enterprises and new communities. In each case, these are designed to offer new ways of solving old problems.”

The emergence of web 2.0 tools has allowed people to use, re-use and create information in new ways.

“By bringing together contents from the 3P sectors, we envisage new possibilities where innovative services can be conceptualised to bring about new value to the 3P sectors,” it added.

Through the RFI, IDA also hopes to gather feedback on the commercial interests and challenges involved in the development of these services, for example, the cost of development and the viability of the services; how content from the 3P sectors can be weaved in with real-time information to bring greater benefits and value; and how data can be categorised and managed in order to differentiate between authoritative and community contents, so that users are able to make an informed choice on how far they can trust the contents and services.

IDA will also be gauging the industry’s interest in participating in a Pilot project from July 2009 to June 2010, and to invite companies to submit proposals for the Pilot.

Interested parties are invited to attend an RFI briefing on 13 February 2009. The RFI will close on 13 March 2009. For more information, email IDA_3PMashups@ida.gov.sg