April 29th, 2008

Semantic Search the US Library of Congress

As the national library of the United States, the Library of Congress has created vast amounts of metadata to describe books and other documents in its collection. Among this metadata is the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), a “controlled vocabulary” for classifying documents by subject. In order words, experts at the Library of Congress have come up with a (large) list of subject headers from which catalogers of documents can choose. As an example, if you look at the Library of Congress record for Tim Berners-Lee’s book Weaving the Web, you’ll that it is classified under “World Wide Web“, specifically “World Wide Web–History“.

Since the Library of Congress isn’t the only entity that classifies documents, you can imagine that other entities (and not just libraries) would interested in reusing the LCSH vocabulary. But how should the Library of Congress make LCSH available so that it can be easily reused?

That’s where the recent release of lcsh.info comes in (see also the lcsh.info ProgrammableWeb Profile):

This is an experimental service that makes the Library of Congress Subject Headings available as linked-data using the SKOS vocabulary. The goal of lcsh.info is to encourage experimentation and use of LCSH on the web with the hopes of informing a similar effort at the Library of Congress to make a continually updated version available. More information about the Linked Data effort can be found on the W3C Wiki.

Let’s look at what you can do with lcsh.info through a couple of examples. First, we return to the subject heading World Wide Web, this time accessible from lcsh.info as

http://lcsh.info/sh95000541

Note the form of the URL: http://lcsh.info/{lccn} where lccn refers to the Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN), an identifier of the subject heading. In this case, the LCCN for World Wide Web is sh95000541.

If you drop this URL into your browser, you’ll get the default format or representation of the information lcsh.info has about the World Wide Web subject header, including:

• broader terms (e.g., Hypertext systems)
• narrower terms (e.g., Semantic Web)
• related terms (e.g., Internet)
• alternative label — (e.g, W3 (World Wide Web))

The diagram below illustrates some of these relationships

To facilitate reuse of the data, lcsh.info offers its data a variety of formats that can be accessed via content negotiation. That is, you use the Accept HTTP header to specify which of the following content type you want:

• XHTML (with embedded RDFa), which is the default value (application/xhtml+xml)
• JSON (application/json)
• RDF/XML (application/rdf+xml)
• N3 (text/n3)

For example, you can use curl to get JSON representation of the World Wide Web subject header:

curl -v -L -H “Accept: application/json” http://lcsh.info/sh85062913

By looking at the RDF/XML and N3 representations, you can see a concrete example of semantic web approaches to express notions of broader, narrower, and related terms as well as alternative labels using

• Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS), which is “a model for expressing the basic structure and content of concept schemes such as thesauri, classification schemes, subject heading lists, taxonomies, folksonomies, and other types of controlled vocabulary”
• designs rules for linked data to represent the network of interconnected subject headings

This experimental but promising service may soon pave the way for full production level web services from the Library of Congress.

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Posted by Raymond Yee as Gov, SemanticWeb at 1:29 AM | 1 Comment »

April 18th, 2008

Follow the Oil Money

Did you know that George W. Bush received $2,649,725 in oil contributions is his 2004 election campaign? Or that in 2008 Rudy Giuliani received $659,158, John McCain received $291,685 and that Barack Obama received $163,840? These and other bits of political trivia and insight come from a useful site that was recently Mashup of the Day: Follow Oil Money. The very well done and enlightening service is subtitled “tracking petroleum industry campaign contributions.” It draws from over 8,000 contributions from 6000 companies to deliver a rich set of tools for searching and visualizing where the money comes from and who it goes to.

As co-creators Greg Michalec and Skye Bender-deMoll describe:

We’ve created a map of the political campaign contributions from companies in the oil & gas industries to politicians who are candidates for federal office. This is a relationship map of the contribution network. That means that unlike a physical map, where points are positioned at a geographic location, the icons for the companies and candidates are placed so that they are that they are as close as possible to whomever they contribute to or receive contributions from.

Another way to imagine it is like a molecule: the companies and candidates are like atoms, and the contributions are like atomic bonds. Or, one can think of it like the popular websites Facebook or MySpace, in which companies and politicians have become ‘friends’ by giving money.

Data comes from a variety of sources including the Sunlight Labs API, the Democracy In Action API, the Federal Election Commission (FEC), Center for Responsive Politics, and GovTrack.us. Skye provides more background on his blog.

The developers even let you know what tools they used to build it: MySQL, PHP, Graphviz, and the script.aculo.us and TableKit ajax libraries.

For more on government-related APIs, mashups, and news (like Tracking Money and Politics), check the Government API and Mashup Dashboard.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Gov at 2:45 AM | 1 Comment »

April 15th, 2008

Connecting Money and Politics: MAPLight.org

Just in time for the next election season, the team at MAPLight.org offer the MAPLight.org API which enables developers to “illuminate the connection” between money and politics by providing detailed funding information for candidates for political office. It’s a growing data set and currently MAPLight covers candidates for the U.S. Congress, presidential elections, and the California Legislature.

The API is constructed using standard REST protocol with data results returned in XML format. In order to use the API, you need to know a candidate’s Federal Elections Commission (FEC) ID. MAPLight provides a link to a tool for looking up FEC IDs on its API home page.

For example, the FEC IDs for presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Barack Obama are P00003392, P80002801, and P80003338, respectively. Given the FEC ID’s, you can easily obtain today’s campaign contribution information for each candidate, using this request:

http://data.maplight.org/map_fec/financial-summaries.xml
?ids=P00003392,P80002801,P80003338

Here’s an example from our mashup listing of their lookup widget:

The MAPLight API is part of an emerging trend where mashups and APIs are developed to aid citizens in monitoring government and its workings. You can find more examples in the Government APIs and Mashups Dashboard.

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Posted by KevinFarnham as APIs, Gov, Money at 1:16 AM | 1 Comment »

March 28th, 2008

Mashups in Learning-Focused Organizations

The New Media Consortium (NMC), “an international not-for-profit consortium of nearly 250 learning-focused organizations dedicated to the exploration and use of new media and new technologies,” highlighted data mashups as an important emerging technology in its 2008 Horizon Report. The report estimates that it will take 2 to 3 years (PDF) for mashups to become part of the mainstream for “teaching, learning, or creative applications.”

Following upon the report is the online 2008 NMC Symposium on Mashups scheduled for next week, April 1-3. On the program are such talks as “The Future is a Monstrous and Marvelous Mashup”, “Learning From the Mashup: Are We Blending Our Future, or Throwing Our Future in the Blender?”, “Confessions of a Mashup Un-Artist”, and “Information Visualization Using Mashups and Web 2.0 Tools”.

Might the NMC report and symposium be a sign that mashups are finally being embraced by forward-looking learning-focused organizations? In the meantime, check out the 4 education-related APIs and 36 “education” tagged mashups already in ProgrammableWeb.

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Posted by Raymond Yee as Events, Gov at 1:04 AM | 2 Comments »

March 18th, 2008

45 Mashup Contests and Counting

If you know how to develop mashups then you may be in line to win some very big prizes. To get a sense of just how much money and how many prizes, take a look at the ProgrammableWeb Contest Guide and you’ll find that there have been more than 45 mashup contests thus far. Prizes include Xbox 360 systems, $10,000 Alien ware computer systems, $50,000 in cash, and more. The contest prizes are getting bigger and more spectacular all the time. For example, in September 2007, Adobe awarded a $100,000 “trip of a lifetime” to the winner of the AIR Developer Derby. In December, startup Ooyala won the $100,000 first prize in Amazon.com’s AWS Startup Challenge (see our earlier post about the contest).

In March the contest with the biggest prize to date gets underway. The winner of Salesforce.com’s Force.com Million Dollar Challenge will receive a $1,000,000 investment in their start-up company and a cubicle at the Salesforce.com incubator for one year. The most recent contest announcement was just last week when Zynga announced a competition for game developers using their platform.

Winning Mashups

So, what types of mashup have people developed to win these contests? With more than 45 contests already having completed, the winning entries have spanned a broad spectrum, as you’d expect. Quite a few prize-winning mashups provide services that are of everyday value to people. For example, the Home Locator mashup, winner of the Adobe Flex Developer Derby, lets you search real estate listings with photos and maps (mashup profile).

Need a doctor after hours? As we reported last year, the After Hours Doctor’s Office mashup, winner of the 2007 Etel Mashup Contest, transcribes office voice mails left by patients for doctors into text and then sends them via SMS to the doctor. It’s great demonstration on how to get in contact with your doctor when you know she or he is not in the office.

The PamFax mashup , which won the 2007 Skype Mashup Competition, lets you send a fax to any fax machine in the world, paying with your Skype Credit (our profile).

Meanwhile, if you’re wondering about campaign finance and influence in your state, take a look at the winner of the Sunlight Foundation’s Mashup Congress Contest. The Unfluence mashup will show you your state’s political contribution data (our profile).

So, what stories are others identifying as being very interesting and relevant? What better source for this information is there than Digg? To our benefit, Digg offers the Digg API to developers, and many people have taken advantage of this to develop some very useful mashups. The Digg Expose mashup takes Snap.com images from Digg and displays them in a configurable view. You can drag the images around, sort them, or change the category. The Digg Charts mashup (profile), another Digg API Contest finalist entry, is a Flex application that generates charts comparing popular stories. Additionally, a graph is generated showing a selected story’s popularity over time. See all finalists in the Digg API Contest in our earlier coverage.

And the Ooyala application that won Amazon.com’s AWS Startup Challenge is really a platform and not a simple mashup. Ooyala provides capability for improving delivery, monetization and analytics of online video, utilizing Amazon web services.

Stay Posted

Mashup and API contests are clearly a growing venue for developers and API providers. Use the ProgrammableWeb Mashup Contests Guide and the Contests blog page to keep posted on ongoing and upcoming contests. If you know of a contest that isn’t yet listed, click the “add it” link on that page to share the information with the PW community.

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Posted by KevinFarnham as Amazon, Contests, Gov, Money at 2:28 AM | No Comments »

January 16th, 2008

USAspending.gov: You Will be Watched

We recently added this new API listing to the US government site USAspending.gov which provides API access to budget data, but we didn’t notice a detail which one of our readers did: that there’s a somewhat intimidating, red-text warning on the homepage that says:

WARNING: This is a United States Federal Government computer system that is “FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY.” This system is subject to monitoring. Therefore, no expectation of privacy is to be assumed. Individuals found performing unauthorized activities are subject to disciplinary action including criminal prosecution. Click here for more information.

In his blog post Coby Logen points to a variety of potential issues and inconsistencies in the site:

• “For Official Use Only” — This means the information is sensitive, but unclassified. If this is true, then USASpending.gov contains information that should not be released to the public.
• No expectation of privacy — This is in direct conflict with the website’s privacy policy, which opens: “the privacy of USASpending.gov customers is of utmost importance.” It also says that no personally-identifying information is automatically collected when you visit USASpending.gov. The warning and the privacy policy cannot both be correct.
• Unauthorized activities — What exactly would be unauthorized? If the information on the site really is “For official use only”, then it is unauthorized for a private citizen to even access the information.

And later on notes that:

Although there are other ways to get federal budget information, the warning on USASpending.gov is unfortunate, because it is wrong and it violates federal policy. USASpending.gov does not meet the definition of “For Official Use Only”; it contains public information. There is an expectation of privacy; no personally-identifying information is collected from visitors. The warning conflicts with OMB Memoranda, which require each government site to “post clear privacy policies” and adhere to them, because the warning significantly obscures and confuses the site’s privacy policy.

Coby’s post points out a variety of good alternatives including the Sunlight Foundation who provide the same data via the Fedspending.org API as well resources on our Government API Dashboard.

In the meantime, you’ve been warned.

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Posted by John Musser as Gov, Issues, Law at 3:49 AM | 6 Comments »

November 20th, 2007

Access Denied: Mapping Web 2.0 Censorship

See how censorship targets online communities around the world with the Access Denied Map (see our full mashup profile here). As mashup creator Sami Ben Gharbia describes:

In order to shed light on the battle being waged between state censorship and anti-censorship groups, I’ve created the Access Denied Map, an interactive Google Maps mashup that provides information about the censorship efforts targeting various online social networking communities and web-based applications. Each marker on the map highlights the situation in a specific country that is barring access to major websites. Clicking on the marker opens an information window containing text, images or video describing the nature of censorship and the efforts to combat it.

Over the last half-year, governments in China, Tunisia, Syria, Turkey, Burma, Thailand and Morocco have all cut off access to video-sharing websites. In the space of two months, between September 3rd and November 2nd, 2007, Tunisia has blocked access to two popular video-sharing websites, Dailymotion and Youtube, preventing Tunisian Internet users from both viewing and posting videos. Both websites remain blocked in Tunisia. Access to the Flickr photo-sharing site was recently restored in China, but it remains blocked in Iran and in the United Arab Emirates. Metacafe and Photobucket are also banned in few Middle Eastern countries such as Iran and the United Arab Emirates.

Blogging services are being targeted as well. Over the last three months, Turkey, Thailand and China have banned wordpress.com, while Blogspot is over-blocked in Syria and Pakistan and only recently restored in China. The Livejournal blogging service is blocked in Morocco and in Iran and it has been reported to be also blocked in China. Other popular services like Technorati, Blogrolling, Xanga, Movable Type, Typepad, Feedburner and Blogsome have been blocked on and off for the past couple of years in countries such as China and Iran.

[via]

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Gov, Mapping at 2:00 AM | 2 Comments »

November 16th, 2007

How to Avoid Extinction

How much impact does your daily activity have on the environment? You might be able to answer this question using new carbon footprint calculation mashups built with our recent API listing: AMEE, the Avoid Mass Extinctions Engine. AMEE launched their platform in June of this year and their mission is to “Enable any climate campaign to use a common standard for Carbon Footprint Profiling and Measurement”. The underlying data comes from a variety of sources including the UK government. The software portion is available as open source and the developer, dgen.net, offer professional services to groups looking to build on the platform.

Read the rest of “How to Avoid Extinction” »

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Posted by John Musser as Featured, Gov, Green, Nonprofit, Popular at 2:05 AM | 3 Comments »

July 5th, 2007

New APIs: Printing and US Gov Documents

A quick update on a couple of the newer API additions to our directory, the first as a way to extend web-based printing and the second as a means to access over 300,000 US government documents.

• Tabblo: A suite of simple developer tools from HP for making web sites more printable. This initial release provides a templating engine that allows web pages to be re-formatted for better printing.
• LOUIS: A collection of about 300,000 Federal Government documents, scraped daily from the Government Printing Office website, GPO Access. This API is a web framework for accessing the collection. Essentially, you can pass filtering parameters to document feeds, and receive results in XML syndication format. The overall scheme is based on Google’s GData API. This is another very useful API created thanks to the support of the Sunlight Foundation. A good earlier example is the Follow the Money API from the Institute on Money in State Politics.

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Posted by John Musser as APIs, Gov at 12:06 AM | No Comments »

May 18th, 2007

Congress Exposed via Sunlight Contest

Earlier this month the Sunlight Foundation announced the winners of their Mashup Congress contest. See our earlier coverage Mashup Congress, Win Money for some background. The judges included Esther Dyson, Craig Newmark, and Jimmy Wales. In the end the contest was a success and as they note “Each entry proved the case for more transparency in Congress and the creativity of American citizens if provided access to data.” Who won?

• The winners of the first place $2,000 prize were Skye Bender-deMoll and Greg Michalec who created Unfluence. Built using the Follow the Money API it gets you more insight into the truth of campaign finance via an interactive network map of state level political contribution data.



• Citycon: Another good contest entry and first runner-up. Lets you find detailed information about any member of the current 110th US Congress.



• Congress Meets Second Life: One we covered earlier that uses the SunlightLabs API to create an info centers on the Second Life Capitol Hill that offers detailed information on members of the U.S. Congress. Our profile link takes you to a YouTube video of the mashup.

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Posted by John Musser as BestMashups, Contests, Featured, Gov at 12:03 AM | 1 Comment »