Yesterday I spoke about the Federal Governments shiny new Digital Economy blog and the question of what to do with Public Service Information (PSI).
Well here's an excellent example of what you can build using freely available PSI and tools such as Google Maps.
For those of you who may not be aware, the NSW Government operates a public list of those eating establishments that have failed health inspections. This "Name And Shame" list was created to ensure that repeat offenders couldn't just attempt to sweep things under the carpet, rather they would be exposed to the cold light of public exposure.
The Name and Shame list, is in fact that, an updated list of offenders with links to breaches and the locations where the breaches occured. All very well and good, I'm always for PSI being released, however it does require a bit of hunting around to work with.
Then along comes gotgastro.com, a site put together by Lindsay Holmwood, a developer based in Sydney. Gotgastro strips out the information from the list and then, using freely available tools such as Googles geocoding service, that information is presented on a Google Maps mashup that presents both the location of the offender, when the offence was noted and what the actual offence was, all in an easy to use Google Maps interface. So how long did it take Lindsay to put together this service? About 5 hours apparantly, and three of those hours were spent working out how to scrape the information from the name and shame list. Imagine how quickly he could have put it together if the list were available in an xml format.
This is a brilliant example of what I was talking about yesterday. Lindsay has taken freely available PSI and has turned it into a new service, something that the Food Authority might not have had the inclination to build, but, fills a need. Not only that, but Lindsay has made the code for the site available so if anyone wants to contribute to improving the service further, they can.
This is what we need to encourage, bright people doing bright things to further the flow of information.