Open Data MashUp Lab

There has always been data. From early records of merchants in the old world to massive government warehouses filled with data on paper, not so long ago. While the availability and use of data turned into information and knowledge has always been around us, we are now entering a new era. Never before has there been so much data potentially accessible for so many people thanks to the digitization of data and (almost) universal access through the internet.

The word data comes from the Latin plural of datum which means “something given” – this is how we can now look at data as never before. A gift to build with; a gift to let ideas come to life with.

More and more data sources are becoming publicly available and discoverable. Before this if you had an idea you had to gather all the data yourself. Now you can easily build your idea on the data generated by other great ideas. There are also great difficulties in this. Where can you find the data sources? What protocol do you have to use to access this data? These data sources are generated by commercial companies like Facebook or Microsoft, but also by governments and governmental agencies.

In the Open Data MashUp Lab we will examine data sources that are available and ways that these are discoverable and accessible. We will work with the people in the lab to find out what mash-ups we could imagine with the data that is available.