Semantic tech startup Ontodia took the grand prize at New York City’s BigApps 3.0 contest on Tuesday. As covered in this article, Ontodia’s NYCFacets is a Smart Open Data Exchange for the developer community that catalogs all the NYC-related data sources already present in the New York City Open Data Catalogue.

“Now that we’ve gotten this validation, we’ll charge full-steam ahead with our bigger vision for pragmatic Linked Big Open Data in NYC,” says Ontodia co-founder Joel Natividad.

NYCFacets today does the massaging and federation of data for developers “so they can build whatever apps they want.” But in the future he sees other opportunities for journalists to leverage the data, for example, or in the service of citizen-mashups or perhaps even to power Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests via a portal.  “But we need to lay down the foundation first. So we started with NYCFacets,” he recently told the Semantic Web Blog.

Other prizes were awarded to Work+, which won second place as best overall application to help home workers find places to do their business other than their small and cramped apartments. Embark NYC won as best mobility application for helping riders navigate the subway. You can view all the winners here.