Today in San Francisco the winners of round three of this year's Knight News Challenge, which focused on data, were announced. These projects were awarded a total of $2.2 million to make the large amounts of information produced each day available, understandable and actionable. And the winners are...

• Safecast. A "citizen science" effort, in collaboration with professional scientists, this project will measure and share air quality data in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities.
• LocalData. This set of tools helps communities collect data on paper or via a smartphone app, then visualize the data through an easy-to-use dashboard.
• Open Elections. A free, comprehensive source of U.S. election results, which takes into account campaign spending, demographic changes, legislative track records and more.
• New Tools for OpenStreetMap. This popular wiki-style mapping project will become easier to contribute to or modify.
• Pop Up Archive. This project will put on the web multimedia content in a way that makes it easy to search, reuse and share.
• Census.IRE.org. An Investigative Reporters and Editors project to make it simpler to access U.S. Census data.

This is a big data month for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Last week Knight also announced the winners of its Civic Data Challenge.

The News and Tools for for Digital Innovators blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.