# A Competition? By the UK Government?
Wow! The UK Government have gone all BBC Backstage on us!
I’ve just read the article on the BBC News Website entitled “Government launches data mash-up“. In the spirit of competition, I thought I would share this information with you all.
The campaign/competition is about generating good ideas which can be done with new Government data, this is called “Show us a better way“… and involves information from various sectors including Neighbourhood Statistics, NHS Hospital Information, other Healthcare Information, Schooling Information and information from London Gazette.
Unfortunately, all this information doesn’t seem to be have some kind of common access and they it all seems to be in different formats (there’s even an Excel file!). So a warning in advance is that you’ll have to do some transformations on the data before you can start using the data together.
This is where the difference between Mash-ups and Mesh-ups come!
Mash-ups
When you do a Mash-up, you generally have to bodge two or more data sources together (using data transformations). Then you have to use a lot of hard work stick it into a graphical