TAPP NYC was conceived and built by 10x Studio in New York City in response to the NYC BigApps competition.

New York City has released over a hundred tables of city data for public use -- the Datamine. Some of it is banal, some is interesting. People need to use it - analyze it, overlay it, map it. There are two barriers: 1) The data is in raw form and generally updated via an Excel file, so a programmer needs to build the application to import the tables into a usable database. 2) The applications will be isolated from each other, so each is an island of an idea.

TAPP NYC is a platform that takes datasets from the Datamine does a couple of things to make the data useful.

1. TAPP makes them available to applications via a simple API. At the same time, by tagging the datapoints, we enable two applications that access the same datapoints to share information about it.
2. TAPP enables users to highlight the places and events (the datapoints) they find significant. By rating and posting, users bring certain places to the surface. Other apps that use the platform stream their posts back to the TAPP Feed, making a broad repository, a layer of user-authored data on top of the NYC data.

Any online application may use the API to pull a datapoint from the NYC Datamine (more about that here). This datum is tagged, so other applications using the data will know when they are talking about the same thing. When users of that app post about it, this post is received by the TAPP Feed.

You can think of each datapoint as a virtual space. It is associated with a particular point in real space along with other stable properties. Yet because users attach posts to it and converse with each other it is a crucible of spontaneous activity.

The TAPP NYC core site features a search engine that covers 7 of the datasets (more are easily added through an import process). TAPP uses Google maps to display the found results. Visitors may post comments about any of the datapoints using their existing Twitter (OpenID tk) account, and the comments may be streamed to Twitter.

Underlying the platform concept is the idea that the distinction between developers and users is actually a continuum. As tools become more accessible, more can use them, in a movement from experienced developers to amateurs and students to bloggers and finally to any interested user. Platforms lower barriers to entry and enable connections in the process.