Challenge
Population Register Centre, PRC, has a lot of upkeeped data in Suomi.fi Finnish Service Catalogue. The data was about all the services and their locations in Finland which are financed from public funds. This service information data was something that needed to be made available for the public to use. They wanted to see if they could use an emerging technology such as augmented reality (AR) to make the most out of this data.
Solution
We developed the “Service Locations application” for Android: Using the Service Locations (beta) application, you can find the public services near you on the map or as visualisations on your smartphone. The application displays locations of public services and uses augmented reality features so that you can find them more easily.
The public service locations are shown on the map that could include government agencies, libraries, indoor swimming pools, sports fields, day-care centres, schools, health centres and other services financed from public funds. When you turn the mobile device, the view in front of you appears on the camera screen and the nearby service locations are shown on the display.
The service locations (beta) application retrieves the information from the Suomi.fi Finnish Service Catalogue, which contains the details of the services and service channels provided by public sector organisations. The information on services and service locations found on the Suomi.fi Web Service is also based on the Suomi.fi Finnish Service Catalogue.
Effect
This solution made it possible to provide a service to citizen that is both useful and fun. Useful in a way that the information shown in the application was nowhere to be found before and AR made the application more appealing for users. In addition, the Service Locations application encourages organizations to upkeep their data also in the future since it is proven that that data is being well used.
