Week 7

This week's lecture focused on the idea of mash-ups. A mashup is an application that combines data from two or more different external sources based on the theme of the project. This would benefit group projects in terms of the marketing aspect. We then discussed the three features of mash-ups which are combination, visualization and aggregation. We were then split into groups to discuss any mash-ups we may have completed in the past and what mash-up we would create if we were given the opportunity.
An interesting article I read this week was about mash-ups by Daniel Nations (Author of previous article). Daniels explains that a mash-up is just an application that takes information and shows it in a unique way. This definition allowed me to easily understand what a mash-up truly is. He went on to discuss how a mash-up is built and explains whether a mash-up contains or does not contain data from multiple sources. A link to the article can be find below.
In our fourth and final lab of the semester, we were given the task of creating a mash-up using Google Maps. The title of the mash- up is Heritage Oak Trees of Ireland and it shows all the locations in Ireland in which these trees are located. Each location is signalled as a pin and when a pin is selected, information about the tree is selected. Below is the completed mash-up.


What is a Mash-Up?