There has been a lot of interest in governments liberating data. The overall intention is: Data owned by the government in many cases is locked up and could be better by third parties (example Ordnance Survey data).
The USA has many such federal government data liberation initiatives – for instance California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s initiative to reduce data centre footprint, NASA’s Nebula cloud computing environment, apps.gov and others.
In the UK, Tim Berners-Lee unveils government data project. London Mayor Boris Johnson unveils a London data store.
Sites like Openly Local and Mash The State are supposed to use that data and create services through mashups i.e. combining data from two or more external services to create a new service.
This is all good, but don’t we need standards for mashups?
There are two issues: firstly, not all data may be ‘combinable’ with other data and the rights and revenue sharing availed by the mashup may be unclear. Secondly, the mashups themselves need a common framework (standard).
It turns out that there is such an industry led mashup standards initiative called the Open Mashup Alliance which is designed to promote an open schema and language for mashups called Enterprise Markup Mashup Language (EMML).
This is a positive step and it is industry led. It recognizes that ‘data liberation’ is only the first step – we need standards for mashups to make use of the ‘liberated data’.
