Mashups come to Europe

Posted by Martin Stabe on 24 February 2006 at 10:57
Tags: Freedom of Information, Journalism, Mashups, United States

“Mashups” — online projects that combine two or more data sources to create new applications — are one of the hot trends in American online journalism, and now they are coming to Europe.

One celebrated mashup is the ChicagoCrime.org, a web site which uses geographical data from the Chicago police about where crimes committed and allows users to plot them with Google’s mapping tool. The journalist who produced the Chicago Crime site, Adrian Holovaty, has since moved on the Washington Post, where he lead a mashup project that allows users to examine the voting records of members of Congress back to 1991. The Post now has a whole section on its web site dedicated to mashups. This week, mashup enthusiasts gathered at Mashup Camp, an “unconference” in California, to trade ideas and experience.

Now the idea is spreading to Europe, accroding to Steve Outing at the Poynter Institute.

A version of the crime mapping tool has debuted in the Netherlands. Misdaadkaart.nl maps crimes reported throughout the Netherlands, not just in the major cities. So far, it has 20,000 entries. The site was produced by Rob Jan de Heer, who told Outing: “From a journalistic point of view, this will appear to become very handy to, for instance, determine in what city most of a certain type of crimes are taking place, or even within cities which are the most criminal or safest neighborhoods.”

In the UK, the mashup trend has been more subdued, usually not produced done by journalists. But there are some wonderful projects out there, such as TheyWorkForYou, a mashup of Hansard that is far more usable than Parliament’s own web site. It was built by the same people who made UpMyStreet and several similar projects.

Another project, recently highlighted in the Guardian, is British web designer Dom Ramsey’s Local Knowledge site. The site links Google maps with BBC travel news, geotagged photos from Flickr, and even data from speed cameras.
With the Freedom of Information Act having made public datasets more easily accessible, hopefully we will see news organisations doing more innovative investigative work in this area. Let’s just hope that Crown Copyright, which limits what can be done with information obtained under FOIA, won’t stiffle creativity.