map butcher

Mashing up….that’s so 2006 darling….this year you have to be doing it ‘in the cloud’ .

The Government 2.0 Taskforce (think pulled up socks, a sprinkling of  ’2.0′ magic and a whole bunch of semi automatics) are going all mashup on us – watch out!!

The thinking behind this borrows a great deal from a very valuable paper and has a bunch of merit. In fact the taskforce (watch-out!) have just recently been visited by the ubiquitous Mr Parsons (think ex-OS Geo-Daddy, now Google Geo-Daddy).

Anyway despite the trite label the competition looks fun and hopefully yields results. I know that the NZ Geospatial Office tried this a year or so ago, but I’m not sure where the results got the NZ economy or society? If I remember correctly ProjectX won and did their own take on Oakland (sans coolness and crime)

‘Mashing’ up of data is IMO the bread and butter of GIS, however the ’2.0′ phenomena of the past few years has arguably succeeded in placing spatial data on the map (pardon the pun) over the traditional heavyweight GIS approach – no need to start a paleo-neo shit fight here (its boring get over it).

So get your masher out and show the taskforce (watch-out!!) what can be done with a good set of tools and a bunch of data.