Adding value to data by using external information from the web

Matt Biddulph, formerly at BBC, wrote an interesting article on how to use Wikipedia and the Yahoo! API to give structure to flat lists. Starting from a simple list of names of politicians – “THATCHER, Margaret” or “BLAIR, Tony” – he describes step by step how they developed an automated solution which makes use of publicly available web services to come up with a relation graph for the aforementioned persons.

If you ask me, it’s a much more creative way of data aggregation than diggdot.us, for example.