The Impact of OpenSocial at UCSF
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Outline of the UCSF approach to Research Networking, which focuses on rapid iterations of adding new data sources and features to see what works, and abandon what doesn't work.
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The Impact of OpenSocial at UCSF
- 1. Clinical and Translational Science Institute / CTSI at the University of California, San Francisco The Impact of OpenSocial at UCSF in the Context of Changing Priorities for Research Profiling Systems Melbourne, February, 2016
- 2. What is OpenSocial? • An open standard for building small web applications (gadgets) that will run on any open social compliant web site (the container) • The gadgets are built with XML/HTML/JavaScript • The container is meant to be a social networking website, such as LinkedIn, UCSF Profiles, or Facebook.
- 3. The OpenSocial Story • An attempt by Google to dethrone Facebook • The attempt failed, resulting in a tarnished brand but a good technology: Apache Shindig • Why is the technology good? Because it allows your web site to be a platform • Facebook and UCSF Profiles are both good examples of web sites that are platforms
- 4. Open Research Networking Gadgets (ORNG) = OpenSocial + VIVO LOD • We created ORNG for two reasons 1. To expose all researcher data to the gadgets, JSON-LD (and VIVO) made this possible 2. We wanted to create our own brand apart from OpenSocial • Now, like Facebook, we are not OpenSocial compliant (but we are ORNG compliant), and this is good!
- 5. Beyond Mandated Data: Where to next for Research Profiling Systems? • Don’t just think about the data, think about the display • With ORNG, a large amount of what you see on a researchers page will be external data, such as social media and grey literature • Grey literature is faster and more consumable by the general public than traditional literature, we love it
- 6. How to go about Collecting Information for Profiles? • Automate when possible • Semi-automate when possible • Do the work for researchers yourself or with departmental administrators when possible • Engage researchers to use your Research Profiling product and make them not regret it
- 7. Driving Traffic and SEO Rankings • Steal anything and everything you can from http://profiles.ucsf.edu/anirvan.chattergee • Ways to increasing web traffic – SEO product changes: clean URL’s, schema.org, etc. – Local environment: user generated content, links to your pages from other systems at your institution. – External environment: Work with researchers that make a buzz about themselves on line.
- 8. Delivering Value: Engaging Researchers in Profile Management • One way to engage a (UCSF) researcher, find something they care about: themselves • With ORNG and our JSON Web Tokens (JWT) extension, researchers can now check their page views through UCSF Profiles • We have > 10 logins a day for this feature! • Future goal: like Amazon, acknowledge recognized vs authenticated users
- 9. Promoting your University with Research Profiling Systems • Research Profiling = Researcher Marketing • Tell a complete story about your researchers • Make your institution look good by making your researchers look good and be found • The information needs to accurate, complete, attractive and understandable • Play to the strengths of researchers that “get” Research Profiling and the internet
- 10. The State of ORNG and The Impact of ORNG on UCSF Profiles • ORNG picked up by 6+ institutions • Apache Shindig is in the attic, Apache Rave seems stalled • OpenSocial/ORNG/Shindig has allowed us to create many new features for UCSF Profiles with an acceptable level of risk • Not every risk has led to success, but the overall effort has been a great success
- 11. UCSF Profiles Quotes from the UCSF Community “Profiles is the best tool ever. I use it constantly.” Sarah Paris “Profiles is splendid. Congratulations to you and your team.” Bob Wachter “I loved the idea then, and I love it now.” Dan Lowenstein
- 12. Next Steps for Research Networking • Actually linking our linked open data: more cross institutional connections • Today we are like MySpace, we need to be more like Facebook or LinkedIn: more targeted content for logged in researchers • Trusted researcher-to-researcher communication (like LinkedIn)
- 13. Thank you! • http://profiles.ucsf.edu/eric.meeks • http://profiles.ucsf.edu/anirvan.chatterjee • http://profiles.ucsf.edu/brian.turner • http://profiles.ucsf.edu/leslie.yuan • Griffin Webber (Harvard University) • David Eichmann (Univeristy of Iowa)
Editor's Notes
- I’m going to talk about OpenSocial, what it has done for UCSF, and also touch on the bullet points for this conference - beyond mandated data:where to next for research profiling sytems - how to go about collecting information for profiles - SEO rankings and how to make research networking platforms more discoverable - delivering value: engaging researchers in publication and profile management - promoting your university and benchmarking
- Note the word ANY in that top sentence, that’s what it means for this to be a standard. Seems like a good idea, now we are a little less sure. Show the code: http://profiles.ucsf.edu/apps_ucsf Show the home page gadget: http://profiles.ucsf.edu, show add-ons drop down LinkedIn (at one point) was OpenSocial compliant, as was UCSF. Facebook never was, they are both the biggest enemy and the biggest friend of OpenSocial.
- To be honest, I don’t know that this story has all that happy of an ending Note the word AN, not THE. They are still working on this. They have yet to succeed as far as I can tell but fear not, google is doing fine. They now have the highest valuation in the world, passing apple just weeks ago “A platform beats an application every time”. Allows you to add new functionality with practically no risk, and at very high scale. Facebook indirectly hurt OpenSocial but validated the market
- Open Researcher Networking Gadgets Without VIVO and JSON-LD our gadgets saw researchers as teenagers (favorite comic book character, etc.) Don’t need to share gadgets with LinkedIn anyway, gadgets are cheap. OpenSocial is being used as an integration platform by us, Harvard, etc. and also Ford motor company and IBM. Mention wake forest email about Shindig being moved to the attic if I haven’t already at this point. Some of the standards in the umbrella of OpenSocial are doing well (such as Oauth) others I’m less clear on (activity streams)
- The gadgets are often the best looking part of the site because they are built by well funded commercial entities (gadgetizing a widget) We’ve found a sweetspot with ORNG in pulling in realtime data from other sites (because of auth and ability to gadgetize a widget) Show the gadgets: http://profiles.ucsf.edu/amin.azzam, http://profiles.ucsf.edu/eric.meeks If a researcher tweets, twitter is going to know about their latest research WAY before the publishers find out. We want to be a part of that. Researchers who are active in the “grey literature” space (tweeting, youtube, presentations) are our (ORNG) best audience We need to do more (pull in blogs, figshare, etc.). Integrating external ORNG data with semantic data presents a challenge. We do represent ORNG data as LOD, but it often isn’t the type of data that a consumer would ultimately be interested in. (we have the twitter handle but not the tweets themselves). In an ideal world everyone would speak LOD, but they do not. As a “better than what we do now but less than ideal” world we would feed meaningful metadata out. We do have folks consuming our videos from the LOD (I think).
- Well, this has very little to do with ORNG but there are some ORNG sidenotes. I wanted to talk about this anyway. Having UCSF be biomedical only and having pubmed be automatic in Profiles has likely done more our system than anything else I’m going to talk about today. Pulling in photos (biggest driver of traffic) and youtube was a big effort We are friends with the admins. We give them APIs (for publications in drupal sites as well as for formatting task) and they do the hands on work for us. Engagement strategies are worthless if you have a bad product.
- In research networking, we find that many sites are stumbling on the most basic SEO items. Pages 3-6 in 2015 annual report As the dashes go down, you have less control ORNG helps us greatly in user generated content because it allows our researchers to have so many different ways to communicate the various things they do. 360 degree KBD diagram. We have www.ucsf link to us in particular with news stories, and our API users link to us, This last dash you really have no control over. Much like engagement strategies are worthless if you have a bad end user product experience. Page 16 in SEO State of the Union Pages 44 and 45 in state of the Union
- Getting researchers to log into our site has been one of our goal for a while now. We see it as one of the primary next dimensions for taking researching systems, more on that at the end. With this ORNG gadget, we FINALLY have give our researchers a reason to log in for something other than to make an edit. Targeted content, it’s been on our radar for quite a while now. SHOW THIS Gadget We released this recently and we haven’t promoted it much, but people are finding it and they are interested in it. Explain what I mean with that last bullet point. We need to get Griffin to build this for us
- By Researcher Marketing we don’t mean marketing items to our researchers (but we do a little bit of that). Expertise Mining – classic built it and they will come. No, they want. You need to market things. we mean marketing our researchers out to others: Potential collaborators both locally and at other institutions, patients and patient advocates, reporters and the general public. We want all of those people to know about and respect our researchers and the work that they do If your researchers are engaged in social media, reflect it on the site! They are putting hard work into the social media engagement, they want people to know about that and you want their content. It’s a win win for you to put their social media on your site. UCSF Profiles is a site that allows UCSF researchers to improve their personal brand value by making their research look good. Full and engaging. By raising the brand value of our individual researchers and the research that they do, we raise the brand value of UCSF. Show spreadsheet
- Apache Rave never made it off the ground. It might, but I wouldn’t bet on it. If anything OpenSocial was too big and ambitious, and so was Shindig. We use < 30% of what Shindig does so technically, it is OK (even good) for it to be in the attic (although it would have been nice for someone else to do the JWT integration) but as we are used to with OpenSocial, it adds some tarnish to the brand. We’ve made our site nice by 1) investing heavily into our product (we do have more FTE’s working on our system than most). It’s HARD to engage developers to work with open source software, they find it intimidating. It’s EXTREMELY HARD to get them to contribute back to the open source base (VIVO has done a better job than Profiles, but still finds it a challenge I expect). With ORNG, we can add features without altering the profiles code itself. That’s what it means to be a platform. That is where we’ve found success. And yes, we’ve built some ORNG gadgets that flopped and some we eventually tossed: google search, chatter, KNODE But the moral is, stay brave. The hits outpace the strikeouts, and you need to take risk to make things better
- David Eichmann’s work with CTSA Search (http://profiles.ucsf.edu/eric.meek show crosslinks, and the gadget that we may remove or alter) as well as some UC ideas. MySpace was all about telling the world about you. With Facebook it can go in both directions, same with LinkedIn. I want researchers to have Profiles open in the background, something they casually check throughout the day (like the are currently doing with facebook) but with Profiles they might see that some researcher that they published with 5 years ago who works at a different institution is now publishing (or tweeting) about something new and different that they are now getting into. With LinkedIn you can contact someone that you used to work with. You can keep in going back and forth through linked in or switch over to phone, regular email, etc. That’s great, I want us to do that. Final note. This is going to happen, and when it does happen, it’s not going to seem like a big deal (I’ll probably try and present on it all the same). It’s just going to be a natural thing that researchers expect and assume from “the internet”. The question is, are we (all of us, the institutions and our partners) going to make this happen, or is some single entity (google, linkedin, facebook) going to do it. Institutional boundaries are not a barrier for them at all so this top bullet is free. These other items they have as well (and we can do this, we don’t need to build it but we do at least need to integrate with folks who build these things). We have an advantage over the single entity players with our data provenance and, focus on our market (which they currently find to small) and collective brand (a lot of *.edu’s is a powerful thing). But this is not an unsurmountable advantage. Let’s do this while we still have the chance.
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