open data and open APIs enable scientific mashups

Will 2006 be the year of the mashup? Originally used to describe the mixing together of musical tracks, the term now refers to websites that weave data from different sources into a new service. They are becoming increasingly popular, especially for plotting data on maps, covering anything from cafés offering wireless Internet access to traffic conditions. And advocates say they could fundamentally change many areas of science — if researchers can be persuaded to share their data.

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The biodiversity community is one group working to develop such services. To demonstrate the principle, Roderic Page of the University of Glasgow, UK, built what he describes as a "toy" — a mashup called Ispecies.org (http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/ispecies). If you type in a species name it builds a web page for it showing sequence data from GenBank, literature from Google Scholar and photos from a Yahoo image search. If you could pool data from every museum or lab in the world, "you could do amazing things", says Page.

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Nature has created its own mashup, which integrates data on avian-flu outbreaks from the WHO and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization into Google Earth (http://earth.google.com/) (you will need to download Google Earth  before opening the mashup file). The result is a useful snapshot, but illustrates the problem. As the data are not in public databases that can be directly accessed by software, we had to request them from the relevant agencies, construct a database and compute them into Google Earth. If the data were available in a machine-readable format, the mashup could search the databases automatically and update the maps as outbreaks occur. Other researchers could also mix the data with their own data sets.

Mashups mix data into global service by Declan Butler
Nature 439, 6-7 (5 January 2006) | doi:10.1038/439006a

For further more-detailed information on methods, see http://declanbutler.info/blog/?p=16

via Open Access News - What OA to data will make possible

I think Google Earth is an amazing visualization platform for georeferenced information.
Opening up data and innovative linking between publications, data, and various visualizations and applications has a lot of potential I think.

Comments

[marlène]

You can find more mashups on the web 2.0 mashup matrix [http://www.programmableweb.com/matrix] I signaled on a post at http://marlenescorner.blogspirit.com/archive/2006/01/12/mashup-et-tableaux-de-bord.html