Government Mashups

The IT term „mashup“ means to „mix“ or „combine.“ The idea behind mashups is to combine existing data, services or functions. This is how new websites or applications are created.

A typical mashup architecture consists of several levels including presentation, web services and data. Readily available technologies such as XHTML, JavaScript, SOAP/REST, XML or JSON are used.

Examples of mashups are localizing restaurant reviews on a digital map or compiling and visualizing statistical data.



Many online service providers such as YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and Qype have recognized the enormous creative potential of Mashups and release their interfaces for the entire web community. Each newly created mashup can be considered as free marketing for the providers of the associated APIs used in this mashup.

Also in the public sector mashups provide an enormous potential. Combining internal and external data becomes easy and inexpensive. Even employees with no experience in programming can create mashups without much effort. Thus they can adapt their tools according to the changing demands of their work environment. The public sector in Germany is still at the very beginning of this process, which is already transforming public authorities in the anglosaxon countries. The objective of this project is it to showcase the potential of mashups for public administrations and their activities.

Mashup Project

In this project, using FOKUS technologies like MashWeb and Media Web Runtime, the potential of mashups is demonstrated and adapted to the requests of the public sector. At the same time, the requirements that go along with this, such as structured information from governmental authorities are researched and processed. The results are presented in the form of demonstrators, specifications and studies.

Some of the benefits of using mashups include:

• Existing data, services and functionality can be reused.
• Creating new applications can take just days rather than months, since existing data and services are simply recombined.
• Reduced development times lead to lower costs.
• Compared to the development of traditional applications, for mashups, little or no technical skills are required. FOKUS technologies like Media Web Runtime (MWR) simplify accessing local ressources and support platform independent application development.
• Mashup technologies empower users by allowing them to use their own ideas to create custom applications to meet their specific needs.
• With few exceptions, current browsers can be used as development and runtime environments, thus mashups are platform independent.

Mashups in the Public Sector

When speaking of Government mashups we are speaking about the mashup principle being applied to the public sector or the data of the public sector. Some examples of this include the combination and visualisation of various state business support programs or supplementing restaurant reviews with the results of governmental hygiene inspections.

Currently there are a number of identifiable trends, which support the concept of Government mashups. Technologically the web is increasingly being perceived as a platform, which serves as the basis for developing applications such as mashups. Legally, there are a number of existing laws at all levels of government including the Federal, State (Bundesland) and EU which, at least in part, regulate the processing of certain public data. Politicians face growing pressure to explain their own activities as political-administrative procedures become increasingly complex.

The public sector can thus save money with mashups, due to the benefits of simplified, custom application development and the ability to make their policies more easily understood by their constituents.

Structured Data as Basis

One essential prerequisite for the development of Government mashups is the processing of public data into a structured, machine-readable format. Based on this data, public administrators or other relevant actors from business and civil society can create custom applications. In the short term, large amounts of existing data can be extracted from databases and websites using relevant extraction procedures. However the continuous processing of data using a data infrastructure will require governmental, technical, organizational and legal changes. It is possible to develop platforms to process the data and include existing administrative processes in publishing the data. A legal framework however needs to be created for the active preparation of machine readable data and to support its further use.

Current Activities at Fraunhofer FOKUS

At the eGovernment Lab in Berlin, the following activities are being carried out:

• In a parallel study, a number of legal and organizational requirements for Government mashups are being developed.
• Mashups are being used in public sector application projects.
• In the EU project Open Cities technical issues surrounding the provision of public sector information are being researched.
• With demonstrators, the potential of the mashup approach for the public sector is being shown. These showcases include FOKUS the technologies MashWeb (www.fokus.fraunhofer.de/go/mashweb) and Media Web Runtime (www.fokus.fraunhofer.de/go/mwr).

FOKUS Demonstrator: FixMyStadt

Potholes, graffiti or burned out lamps: everyone has seen such nuisances in public spaces. If there were only a way to let the right people in local government know! With mashup technologies and mobile applications, the right solution can be delivered quickly. Information from citizens is added to the data of the local authorities and businesses. Everyone thus benefits from the resulting information.

FOKUS Demonstrator: World Bank Indicator Masher

When most people think of statistics, they think of long, incomprehensible rows of numbers. Visualisation helps make the data intelligible. With mashup technologies, these data can be easily labelled and translated into several different languages and into a number of different graphical forms. The Demonstrator developed by FOKUS allows the development of one‘s own Indicators.