Introduction

Recently whilst reading the quarterly technology review in the Economist I came across an article ‘Mashing the Web’. I was intrigued to know why the Economist would use a word like mashing. In essence the term mash-up comes from the music industry where sound engineers would mash-up two tracks to create a new unique third one. Similar things are happening on the Internet with web sites.

Internet mashing up has also been the target of the wordsmiths with gems such as ‘Web 2.0’ and ‘The Web as a Platform’. This is white hot at the moment and not just with journalists and bloggers but with developers who are, at present, creating some really creative interactive websites based on the new web services being made available.

Recently there was a conference in San Francisco called Where 2.0. It was organized by O’Reilly Media and their focus was on "Where 2.0 subsystem of the Web 2.0 platform." Users are creating a wide range of potentially useful applications from geo-enabled web services and this bubbling creativity is energizing the development of the new Web 2.0 platform.

There are a variety of large commercial companies who are embracing this. Take SalesForce.com, an online CRM company. They have a software toolkit called ‘SmashForce’ which enables “The transition of popular Web sites from simple web pages into programmable ‘re-mixable’ platforms. This has brought new innovation to the consumer Internet, as evidenced by the popularity of Google's Maps service and Yahoo's Flickr.”

Another slick application, which taps into Amazon's book search web service, is BookBurro.com which lets people compare book prices. This sort of Web service can be constructed pretty quickly: Instead of having to build a book search and e-commerce engine from scratch, one person can create something entirely new by combining Amazon's tool with other data sources.

Closer to home

There are some British organisations which are backing this type of development. A great example of this is the BBC. They have an area off their main web site at backstage.bbc.co.uk. The main goal of this area is to encourage developers to build anything they want using BBC content. There is no charge to use their content feeds as long as it is on a non-commercial basis.

I don’t know the differences between the BBC and the Ordnance Survey with regards to their commercial requirements as government agencies. The Ordnance Survey doesn’t have such a large licensing fee from the public – except for the Pan Government Service Level Agreement - but imagine the innovation possibilities if the Ordnance Survey took the BBC backstage strap line “Use our stuff to build your stuff”... for free!! The growth of online mapping in the UK would be exponential.

Corporate changes

All this has caused the world’s largest software company, Microsoft, to restructure their entire organisation in order to adapt their solutions to be more web based and to be delivered more quickly to market. I guess we can all imagine how nervous they must be with all the innovation and interactivity now being provided through a browser. Imagine the fall in revenue if the standard PC user didn’t have to run Windows anymore!

As a result of this restructure I think that it is significant that Microsoft have released toolkits to enable developer access to their VirtualEarth, offering these toolkits at no charge including use in commercial applications. This is extremely similar some would say and in direct competition to Google Maps.

Is this just another article about Google Maps etc, like the one I did back in June? Well not exactly. I believe that the use of this type of technology will become more and more useful in the future for a number of reasons.

Interoperability & Map Mashing

I’ve always found the word, interoperability, a mouthful! Normally this is discussed in the terms of “back office data” and how we can share it. I’m sure you all know the issues with things like data formats. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has been doing some great work on building standards that enable interoperability across data formats but also with web standards such as Web Mapping Service (WMS), Web Feature Service (WFS) etc. These are really making a difference in the web-based geographic world, albeit with some large vendors often adding their own attributes that then debase these interoperability capabilities.

What, you may ask, do interoperability and mashing up have in common? Glad you asked. Let’s think about the electronic government initiative here in the UK with the underlying mantra being ‘joined-up’ government. The real area of complexity for this has been in the joining up of the back office systems and keeping them synchronised. Much of this is being worked on and there is even a ‘connectors’ club for software vendors.

For web mapping and local government the real requirement is to provide public access to information via Priority Outcomes, Local Plans, Parsol etc. This is where we can see web services such as WMS and WFS come into play to allow mashing – sorry joining up.

As an example, when a member of the public is looking at maps of their local area I wonder if they become frustrated when they come to the authority border and all the maps simply stop! Local Authorities with different web mapping software, whether it is MapServer, MapXtreme, ArcIMS etc, all have these WMS, WFS capabilities. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to either allow access or include their neighbouring authorities map related information and therefore start to build a seamless map base? Then we would have a real mapping mash-up!

Conclusion

This innovation is being enabled due to the lack of normal corporate paperwork. I’ve read articles on the subject, one of which mentioned that "every site now is essentially fair game to go in, to modify the site, change it, append it, trim it down."

I believe that, instead of treating the Web just as a handy way to publish information, businesses whether public or private need to start acting like software companies and encourage programmers or their vendors to build services on top of their content. This will provide real value to everyone.

To quote Tim O’Reilly founder of O’Reilly Media “Data is the next Intel Inside”. But as we all know data isn’t anything without its own data – metadata. Metadata is a subject to be discussed all on its own, but it is I believe intrinsically tied to opportunities that will enable more mashing up.

Mike Saunt - September 2005