A few days ago, Dan Cohen, the Director of Research Projects at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, lamented the lack of non-commercial API's:

one of my pet peeves as someone trying to develop software tools for scholars, teachers, and students is the lack of application programming interfaces (APIs) for educational resources.

If your policy or issue-focused organization is like most, you have great data locked away in databases, websites, and reports. You are distributing the information through your traditional communication channels - including the web - but consumers of your information have to come to you to get it, and its only available in formats that you provide. Why not set that data free and let users manipulate and consume it in their own innovative ways?

Empowered by freely available application programming interfaces (APIs), innovative developers can now grab data and tools from multiple sources and combine them to create new and innovative views of the information (check out ChicagoCrime.org for a great example). Commercial organizations are embracing the trend in a big way, and it has spawned a new wave of online applications called mashups.

These commercial organizations have realized that opening their data and tools expands the reach of their services and information well beyond the capacity of thier internal resources - and it lets its information assume new and powerful shapes. However, non-commercial organizations have been slow to embrace the trend, and are noticably under-represented in this current list of over 200 freely available data and service APIs.

There are thousands of motivated innovators out there - set your data free and let them innovate for you.

Technorati tags: nptech, mashups, API, policy