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Documents Find Home In The Cloud

Twenty newspapers, magazines and nonprofit organizations have joined an ambitious data archiving project that will -- at least for a time -- be free to all news hounds and the general public.

Created by journalists and developers at ProPublica and The New York Times, DocumentCloud is cataloging all those papers that reporters, bloggers and civic groups typically discard at the end of a project or investigation. Think of it as Lexus-Nexus on steroids.

By next August, the high-tech data archive should give both professional and amateur researchers easy access to tons of potentially invaluable primary-source material. Using software from DocumentCloud's partners, users will also be able to play with the data and create original displays. For example, uses will likely be able to search for documents by date, topic, person or location, and make connections between them in all kinds of ways.

The Atlantic, New Yorker, Mother Jones, MSNBC, WNYC and The Washington Post are among the most notable publications that are planning to submit documents, files and other data into the DocumentCloud system. Just a few of the nonprofits and organizations on board include The ACLU National Security Project, Center for Democracy and Technology, and the Centre for Investigative Journalism at City University in London.

Once its more than $5 million in grants runs out, a payment system could be necessary to sustain the open-source project. Either way, it has the potential to dramatically accelerate the democratization of information that the Web has already made possible.

As its creators explained in the their original pitch last year, "DocumentCloud will take source documents beyond the inherent constraints of the PDF and out of the realm of clumsy scans or external application plug-ins and for the first time make them an intrinsic part of the semantic Web, and a part of reporting news online."

Read the whole story at The Observer »

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