Six months ago, Ontodia’s NYCFacets walked away with the win at New York City’s BigApps 3.0 conference. In the months since, the Smart Open Data Exchange that catalogs all the NYC-related data sources (which we first covered here) has been busy expanding its team, moving into the NYU-Poly hosted incubator, and getting ready to launch its Smart City platform for general use next year.

A preview of that platform will take place at the upcoming Semantic Technology & Business Conference in NYC. “We are going to our original mission of really creating that data exchange using semantic technology,” says Ontodia co-founder Joel Natividad. It’s putting the focus not on raw data or learning new technologies, but on being a linked answers marketplace – converting raw data to answers rather than just linking raw data.

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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.

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Last week the New York City Council gave its nod of approval to legislation that would require city agencies to publish public data sets in a common format on an online portal for the public’s use. Mayor Bloomberg just signed off on it, with the Open Data Bill legislation to be phased in over six years.

But semantic tech startup Ontodia hopes to help speed up the development of the Big Apple as the Digital City of the Future with NYCFacets, a Smart Open Data Exchange for the developer community just released that catalogs all the NYC-related data sources already present in the New York City Open Data Catalogue.

“There are about 900 data sets in the New York City Open Data Catalogue,” says Ontodia co-founder Joel Natividad. Last year, while at TCG Software Services, he was part of a team that won the Large Organization Recognition Award at BigApps 2.0 – the city-sponsored contest for developers to use NYC Open Data – for participating in creating NYC Data Web, which integrates the NYC.gov data sets into a single web of data for developers. The team also included Revelytix and Spry. “Now that the Open Data Bill just passed, there will be a tsunami of data,” he says.

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