The other data in Mash-ups

With the UK mash-up day coming up at the end of the week, this blog post by J. LeRoy is very timely.

It reports on the response of the Fire Deptartment of Seattle to a google maps mash-up of 911 calls, the dept. has now removed the feed replacing it with a jpeg image. The dept. are not legally mandated to make the information available, but have removed the “machine readable” format version of the information citing “Homeland security concerns”

As Jim points out if they are worried about security they could just put a time delay in the feed as happens with flight progress reporting, this could otherwise set a worrying precedent for data providers !

There is continued debate about the geographical component to mash-ups and how “open” this geographic content is.. well the bigger issue I suggest, is all the other data one might want to map which is clearly not open at the moment.

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.