Mashup Australia Trophy

I am still pretty excited about In Their Honour winning both the Notable Mashing Achievements Prize and the Peoples Choice Award in the Mashup Australia Competition.

It was a mammoth effort at the time and getting some actual recognition (and even some financial gain) was completely unexpected and totally awesome!

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Eating our own fishfood

Goldfish delivers a framework for adding realtime functionality to web applications. In the interest of eating our own dog food I have whipped up a demo to stream multiple user comments into a blog entry.

I am outside the Goldfish team at Cognethos so I have very little inside knowledge on the framework and this demo took a morning to put together.

Meep

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American Civil War Daily on the iPhone

American Civil War Daily answers two fundamental questions:

• What happened today during the American Civil War?
• Where did it happen? Show me a map!

A lite version version is available free, which only supports today's date and shows 5 daily cards.

Flip through daily cards showing important events leading up to and during the deadliest conflict in American history.

Each card shows the date, a succinct description and a zoomable map for the event. You can flip the card over to read the Wikipedia article describing the event.

You can sort your deck of events using two mechanisms:

• Sort by day and month for a this day in history view.
• Select a start date and then sort by day, month and year for a true chronological sequence of events from that date onwards.

The data for American Civil War Daily comes from the American Civil War Timeline Project. This is a community contributed project to collect time and place data for the war. You can come to the site to browse the timeline or even log in and contribute new data.

The Timeline Project currently indexes over 400 hundred data points with new entries being added daily. If a significant event isn't in the database yet, it soon will be.

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So long and thanks for all the designs ...

Cognethos recently used 99Designs to find a logo for our newest product. I was completely blown away by the quality and inventiveness of the submissions.

Apart from having an awesome logo, Goldfish is a slick solution for Real Time Web applications running in the cloud. You can find out more on the blog.

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In Their Honour - Mapping Anzac Graves

I have spent the last couple of weeks frantically working on a project for Mashups Australia, a competition designed to encourage developers to mashup and cleanup government datasets in useful and inventive ways:

In Their Honour

I met Jacqui Kennedy at the first Sydney GTUG meeting and she expressed interest in what I was doing with my World War Two Timeline Project. We started talking and she sucked me into her plans for developing an application for Australians to find their relatives who served, and died, in overseas conflicts. We have talked about lots of ideas for integrating timelines, personal histories and photographs, but our first task was to find records and memorial information for Australians who have served during wartime.

The Mashup Australia competition gave us the perfect spring board for getting motivated on the project. Jacqui tracked down a few sources of data to work with, but found the core data set at the Commonwealth War Graves Commision (CWGC). Given the sensitivity of the information we were presenting, we contacted the CWGC for permission to use their data. Jacqui exchanged several emails with the CWGC, who quite rightfully wanted assurances that their data was not going to be used for commercial purposes or in an inapproriate context.

A week and a half ago, the CWGC gave us permission to proceed and provided us with an excel spreadsheet containing a subset of their data for 102,391 Australian service men and women buried in cemeteries in Australia and around the world. I spent the next week of late nights, writing a collection of python scripts that processed, collated and combined the various data sets we had into two normalized data tables, Soldiers and Cemeteries.

The data isn't perfect, but we have sucessfully combined geocding information with more than half of the data and cross linked it with the data we received from the CWGC. I spent this week implementing a user interface to access this information with a few fundamental goals:

• A sense of gravitas and reverance, consistent with the memorials and cemeteries that we index.
• A streamlined AJAX based user interface to make browsing and searching the lists of names fast and as unobtrusive as possible.
• A minimalist interface, with as few distractions from what we see as the core use case for the system, that is, finding and honouring relatives and friends who have served Australia in wartime.

I am constantly seeing ways we can improve the way the site works, but I think we have made a good start and feel confident and very satisfied with our submission for the Mashup Australia contest.

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