Two mashups of open access government data, Suburban Trends and Know where you live, have taken out top honours in the MashupAustralia contest.

U.S. copyright law should be updated to better reflect the changing ways that mashup artists and other new content creators use existing works, some participants in the first World's Fair Use Day said.

The White House's data.gov effort is spurring the creation of some entertaining and informative applications from private developers.

By combining business intelligence and two foundations of Web 2.0 -- search and mapping -- a police department in the US state of Kentucky has built a brand-new window into crime. This Web-based BI portal allows patrol officers to enter data -- or even pieces of data such as a few numbers from a license plate -- into a simple search interface and retrieve information from their own databases and those of neighboring towns.