The much-anticipated US government catalog of government agency web sites who offer structured data, Data.gov, has gone live. Here’s how they describe their site and their mission:
It seems that the Where 2.0 Conference is full of pleasant surprises. Today, Yahoo announced its Placemaker platform, and Google also announced the release of their Maps Data API (our Maps Data API Profile) as the newest Google Data API.
Today at Where 2.0 Yahoo announced the release of Placemaker, a new “geo-enrichment” platform. The freely-available platform, which includes an API (our Placemaker API Profile), enables developers and publishers to make applications and data sets location-aware by determining the “whereness” of unstructured content (such as blog posts, new articles, feeds, and web pages).
As many jumped into making recommendations on how the U.S. government’s Recovery data should be packaged and disseminated, it’s worth looking into some important previous work in this area, work with which many who are new to open government might be unfamiliar.
Scrapplet, a service that’s a cross between a Netvibes-style start page builder and a browser-based mashup environment, this week released a set of new features for integrating web-based content within the browser. The basic service allows users to build their own web pages by dragging-and-dropping content like text, video, widgets, feeds, etc from other web sites.
We had over a dozen new APIs added to our API directory this week. As with last week’s additions, it’s a mixed set both in terms of functionality and company size. Functionally these new ones include two APIs for video streaming, a document sharing API, and others for email marketing, url shortening, semantic term extraction and online-centric functions like OpenID, web site thumbnail generation, as well as IP-to-geo mapping. Here is a rundown of 7 of these new APIs:
This week saw the widest range of APIs being used to develop mashups we’ve seen in awhile: 42 different APIs used in 7 days. Of those new apps added to our mashup directory, only a handful were map mashups, whereas most of them used more unique APIs: Google Chart API, indeed API, Livekick API, MTV API, NPR API, Tagalus API, TwitPic API, uClassify API, Vimeo API, and the Yelp API. Also, given that within the last 24 hours the highly anticipated Wolfram|Alpha search engine and structured reference went live, we did happen to see a number of semantic and linked-data APIs used this week: Reuters Calais API, DBpedia API, and Freebase API (and we’ve just added a profile for the Wolfram|Alpha API). The list below shows which APIs were used by which mashups:
Google has announced some new features available for its OpenID API. As some of our readers may remember, earlier this year Google released a “Hybrid Protocol” API that combines an OpenID federated login with OAuth access authorization. The API has been enhanced with some extended Attribute Exchange fields and a pop-up user interface for the user-facing approval page.
InternetNews.com’s Kenneth Corbin recently wrote about the National Association of State CIOs conference, where White House science and technology adviser Beth Noveck spoke to attendees about opening up government processes to collaboration in an open source model. According to Corbin, Noveck hinted about an API-driven model that could produce citizen-created mashups and applications.
Google has dominated the search engine world for years, weathering the attempts of many competitors who have tried and failed to capture a piece of the search engine market. True Knowledge, a new natural language search service, is hoping to gain a piece of the search pie by harnessing the power of semantic data queries on the web.
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