GeoPlace announces launch of 2018 Exemplar Awards

Improving public services and overcoming the challenges of data sharing is a key focus for GeoPlace. The Awards highlight best practice in local authorities using land and property and street information to tie different services from across the council together to give a ‘property level view of services'.

Past winners include authorities who have used their gazetteers to underpin many aspects of local government business: from large transformation projects which save authorities millions of pounds, to smaller initiatives which have found clever ways to join up information.

Good data is critical in all of this. Without accurate, current and well-maintained data many of these challenges simply won't be solved.

The Awards highlight Custodians' roles within their authorities and enable their work to be more widely promoted to all parts of the authority. They allow the many services which currently use address and street data to see that the high standard of the data is externally recognised.

This year we are pleased to announce a special Award for ‘Britain’s Most Fantastic Address' which is sponsored by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The ONS has a fundamental interest in addressing. The census is one of the most comprehensive national applications of addressing and needs a complete, accurately classified address list. This new Award highlights just how ridiculous, preposterous, improbable, outlandish, implausible, incredible, unbelievable, weird, fantastic and troublesome addressing can be. And why it's really hard work to make best use of all available data to enhance the provision of population statistics.

Categories this year include:

• Exemplar Award 2018
• Peer Award 2018
• Data Quality and Improvement Awards
• Britain’s Most Fantastic Address Award 2018

The Awards will be presented at GeoPlace's annual conference and exhibition on 10th May at Edgbaston Cricket Ground in Birmingham.

The closing date for entries is noon on Monday 16th April 2018. For more information on the Awards, see the GeoPlace website.

www.geoplace.co.uk