What is Project Nimbus? How do I get started?

What is it?

Project Nimbus is an effort to get more data sets online and accessible by innovators to build on.  We are a small group of volunteer technology professionals funded by corporate donations.  Our efforts are supported by commercial and government entities in and around Singapore / Southeast Asia.

1. Get your [technical preview] application key –

Email us and we will send you a key.  Our email address is projectnimbus@live.com.sg

2. Review the datasets -We are constantly adding new datasets.  As of today, the following datasets are currently available.

3. Review resources and sample code to help you jump start your project -

4. Go and have fun!If you build something cool… drop us an email so we can help shout about you.

Most of the cool and useful applications out there are dependent on some sort useful data.  Traffic conditions, bus times, locations of good food, weather… all these are the foundation of a cool and useful application.  We want to see more of these applications available in our community.  Be it on the iPhone, Android, PC or GPS device in your car… it all starts with an innovator like yourself and DATA!

Many of the Project Nimbus volunteers work with innovators like yourself.  We know you have lots of great ideas.  We also know you have a number of challenges to overcome.   Device?  Data?  UI?  Licensing?  Development platform?  Language?

We thought we would help you address one challenge… access to data.

How are the datasets exposed?

We first work with the community to identify content that would be useful for our local ecosystem.  We then work with content owners to figure out which types of data to release.  All datasets to be exposed as an ODATA REST web service.

Pretty much ALL OF THEM.  If your device / platform can access the internet, you should be covered!  That said, the Project Nimbus team clearly sees MOBILE scenarios as the future so our focus is currently on rapidly enabling these types of scenarios.

Remember, we simply work with content owners to facilitate the exposure of their data following the ODATA REST web service standard.  Once the dataset is released, we continue our efforts by assembling sample code and demos across as many different devices / platforms as we can.