MashupAustralia competition winners announced

Two mashups of open access government data, Suburban Trends and Know where you live, have taken out top honours in the MashupAustralia contest.

Taking place between October 7 and November 13 throughout a series of hack days, the contest was developed for the Government 2.0 Taskforce to show the benefits of open access to Australian government data.

Web developers were encouraged to test the effectiveness of mashups between Australian Government data sets and commercial application programming interfaces (APIs).

Out of a record 82 entries, ‘Suburban Trends’ and ‘Know Where You Live’ were announced the winners of the Mashies trophies.

(The mashups can be viewed on the competition website.)

Created by students Alejandro Metke and Michael Henderson, Surburban Trends is a mashup of crime and census data which illustrates economic, education, safety and socio-economic indicators of Australian suburbs.

“The judges found the ability to compare suburbs visually, combined with the selective choice of statistics was excellent, especially in a field dominated by many entries using similar datasets,” Dr Nicholas Gruen, taskforce chairman said in a statement. Know Where You Live, created by Eric Auld, David Lewis and Simon Wright, is a prototype of a mashup of a range of open access government data based on postcodes.

“The judges loved the very citizen-centric ‘common questions’ user experience of this application and the groovy cool selective repackaging of what could otherwise be considered uninteresting data,” Gruen said.

“The integration of publicly-held historical photographs and rental price data was a nice touch as was the use of Google’s satellite images in the header.”

Earlier this month, the taskforce released a draft report into its use of Web 2.0 technologies, which said Federal Government agencies "must do better" to achieve the Government 2.0 goals and that agencies have not pursued "Government 2.0 in a coordinated way that reflects a whole of government position".

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