Doing More with Less: Mash Your Way to Productivity

Doing More with Less:Mash your Way to Productivity
Kevin Reiss
University Systems Librarian
Office of Library Services
City University of New York
SLA-NY Panel 1-21-2010

Mashups are more than just:

Why Mashups?
Low-cost/low-risk development
Rapid development cycle
Do something fresh quickly
Typically do not require a huge amount of staff time
Utilize someone else’s computing power, i.e. “the cloud”
More and more information service providers are enabling their content to be “mashable”
Subscription content vendors
“Free” Internet services

What is a Mashup?
A web application that combine data and code from content sources out on the web to produce:
Modest improvements to an existing web services (ex: embedded a list of relevant links from a third party service in an existing websites)
An entirely new web application
Mashups are typically made up of both:
Local Content
Remote Content
A mashup is composite web application
Can be thought of as “Remixing the web”
Presents the user with a new view or service built on top of existing data and services
Executed with lightweight web programming techniques
Web services
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)

What do you need to know (technically speaking)?
Basic HTML
Widgets
“<embed>” a service or data
RSS
Collating and parsing feed data is an integral part of many mashups
Many “web services” return data as feeds
Basic javascript
Work with simple APIs and XML as a data format
Server side scripting languages
Allows you to fully interface with APIs in your application
Integrate local and remote content on a complex scale

Who’s Doing It?
Just about everyone
Yahoo
Many services
Google
Book/MAPS
Amazon
Libraries and library content vendors
Federated search providers/designers (these maybe the original library mashup)
Even the Library of Congress - http://id.loc.gov/authorities/

Web Services at Yahoo

Web Services at OCLC

App Services at flickr

What Does one Look Like? – A Google Maps Mashup

Or This? A Twitter Mashup

Which is possible because:
Which brings you to RSS:
Which is the basis for everything on the last slide

Mashup Building Blocks
Data that lives somewhere on the web and a good idea on what to do with it
Feeds (RSS, Atom, RDF) are often the key ingredient
Websites as a service provide content in:
XML
JSON
Code that lives on the web
Application Programming Interfaces

Mashup Levels
Basic
Widget Based Mashups
Intermediate
Working with feeds
Working with a mashup aware editor (ex: Yahoo Pipes)
Advanced
Working with Web Services
Working with Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)
Building your own web application

Widgets
The Simplest Mashups

The Simplest Mashups
Widgets
No coding required
Copy and paste
May need security clearance to run remote javascript hosted on the widget providers web server

Explore Widgets at delicious

Widgetize Your Content

Copy and Paste
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/js/my.delicious.account?title=My%20Delicious%20Bookmarks&icon=m&count=5&sort=date&tags&extended&name&showadd"></script>
Into the webpage of your choice

Embedded Delicious

Librarything Widgets
Get Your Widget
Select Your Options

Slideshare

Which Can Give You:
The Widget
Embeddable Code
This strategy works for youtube, google video, flickr, and most of the “social” web

Feed Based Mashups
Repackaging and Repurposing Data

Feed-based Mashups
General strategy:
Identify a bunch of feeds you want to keep track of
Organize them or mine them for useful data
Process them regularly
Keep track of when they fail
Present the results back to your users

Basic Feed Content
RSS - http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/ols.inside?count=15
JSON - http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/json/ols.inside?count=15

Basic Example - Community Planet or the Feed of Feeds

Experiment with Feeds and Yahoo Pipes (http://pipes.yahoo.com)
No coding required
A good place to experiment with and identify a mashup strategy with little risk or effort
Clone the pipes of other users to get started
When you are done with your pipe you send the ouput to:

Pipes Interface – Sorting Pubmed Query Feeds
Drag and Drop
Programming

Pipe Results

Using Feeds in the Library
Use feeds to aggregate search results from commonly used queries
Create a bundle of search results important to your organizations
Use feeds to show new publications/titles
Combine with Amazon or Google Book search to add new content
Use feeds to aggregate organizational content
Pull together bookmarking services of employees
Pull together blogging content from employees

Pipes works with more than just Feeds: Data and Services

Web Services and APIs
Programming the Web

The API Building Block: A Restful Web Transaction
Find a data source?
Ask it a question in the form of a URL?
http://myservice.com/?idrequest=myrequestcontent
You also have to answer: Am I eligible to get this data?
Many APIs/Web Services require a developer or account ID to use hence:
http://myservice.com/?id=mydevid&request=myrequestcontent
Get data back in XML – often using AsychronousJasvascript and XML (AJAX)
Parse data with your own local code or the api in question
Present parsed data in your application
Resources with unique IDs work great in these sorts of transactions
http://myservice.com/ISBN
http://myarticleservice.com/pubmedid

Example: the Yahoo! SPELL Checking Web Service
The Question:
The Answer:

Home for this Service

Where it might live? – Example Deployment
Response from Yahoo!

A fresher setting

Programming with APIs
Typically simple
The key is to fail gracefully
Make sure what the terms of usage are
Many Vendors now Provide APIs
Including:
Most major social web services (flickr, LibraryThing)
Most major web sources of “book” data (OCLC, Google Books, Amazon, Open Library)
Many library software vendors (Examples - Ex Libris, Serials Solutions)

Query Worldcat via API

Using the Google Map API: Digital Murray Hill
http://murrayhill.gc.cuny.edu
Wordpress powered architectural history website
Open Source Content Management System (CMS)
PHP/MYSQL Driven web application
Combines a number of content sources
Descriptive architectural metadata
Geocoding for local addresses
Google maps content
flickr content

Map Example

Coding with the Google Map API
Setting a Map Icon
Setting the Map Canvas

Flickr Integration

Community Photos

Mashup Wrap-Up
Things to Remember about Mashups

Mashups and Content Management Systems?
Is your current web content management system (CMS) mashup friendly?
Open source CMS systems are ideal vehicles from which to explore mashups at a substantive level
Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, etc.
All of the above have extensions that support many of the most popular mashup data formats, data providers, and apis

A Good Place to Start

Wordpress Dashboard
Wordpress Delicious Widget

Mashup Issues
Dependence on data or code that in some part you do not control
Security Policies can change
Access policies can change
Usage limits on key-based apis
Legal Implications
Make sure to read the terms of service for any service you expect to make public
Most non-commercial issues are fine

What can I do?
See if your major information service providers:
Provides feeds
Try aggregating them in some useful fashion
Experiment with <embed> options from services like Youtube or Slideshare in order to expand and highlight interesting organizational content
Experiment with the major social web services:
Identify a “social” aspect in your organization that already exists
See if you can aggregate it and produce a useful new view of the data
Code your own mashup using apis

Check out Library Mashups
Visit the Programmable Web
http://programmableweb.com/
Library Related APIs
http://techessence.info/apis
Pro Web 2.0 Mashups by Raymond Yee
http://blog.mashupguide.net
Library Mashups by Nicole Engard
http://mashups.web2learning.net/
In particular visit the link compilation at:
http://mashups.web2learning.net/links

Are my services and data mashable?
Does my own website provide feeds?
Can my users <embed> content from our major services?
Have we selected services and software that play well with mashups?

Conclusions
Choose web resources that are mashable when you can
Support for this is growing among web content providers
Mashups can:
Cost little beyond staff time
Be fun and easy to create
Be throwaway work that achieve substantial results
Add value in unexpected ways
Develop into essential services

Doing More with Less: Mash Your Way to Productivity

by kevinreiss on Jan 21, 2010

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Doing More with Less: Mash Your Way to Productivity — Presentation Transcript