Link – Not a Mashup
“Yes, one can use the ArcWeb SOAP API to push point data to the service to be rendered onto a map and display the resulting map image in a web page, but this is not what we’re talking about when we say mashup. A web map mashup, in the chicagocrime.org sense, combines data (locations, images, etc) and maps in your browser. The browser is where the mashing occurs, increasingly with the use of tools like Greasemonkey, not a GIS server.”
I’ve actually thought much about this as every time I write the word “mashup” on my blog, but I’ve decided to call anything that takes two desperate sources a mashup (I guess by my definition everything done in GIS is a mashup). Maybe we need to define mashup more, but lets just say I’ll use the lowercase form of mashup instead of the more formal Mashup. All mashups are not created equal, but when dealing with a buzzword what is one supposed to do?
