What Can Mashups Offer?

Slide 1: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/conferences/rsc-conference-2007/ What Can Mashups Offer? RSC 3.0 Conference, October 2007 Brian Kelly Acceptable Use Policy Recording/broadcasting of this talk, UK Web Focus taking photographs, discussing the UKOLN content using email, instant messaging, University of Bath blogs, SMS, etc. is permitted providing distractions to others is minimised. Bath, UK Resources bookmarked using 'rsc-conference-2007' tag UKOLN is supported by: This work is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 licence (but note caveat)

Slide 2: About Me / About This Talk Brian Kelly: • UK Web Focus – a JISC/MLA-funded post • Advises on Web technologies – emerging technologies, standards & best practices • Based at UKOLN – a national centre of expertise in digital information management • Regular blog posts on UK Web Focus blog at <http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/> This talk: • Introduces the concept of mashups • Provides some examples • Suggests why RSCs should engage in making use of mashups 2

Slide 3: What is A Mashup? A mashup is: • A Web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool; a typical example is the use of cartographic data from Google Maps • Three general flavours: 1. Consumer mashups: e.g. Google Maps apps, with emphasis on presentation 2. Data / enterprise mashups: merging data from internal and external sources 3. Business mashup: combination of above: combines data integration, presentation plus addition functionality, such as collaboration features From Wikipedia 3

Slide 4: How I Use Mashups (1) Some simple mashups which we can all create • Location of the organisation And note benefits over conventional maps • Location of other organisation – in this case, places I’ve spoken at These examples require me to copy JavaScript code and tweak parameters or edit simple XML files 4

Slide 5: How I Use Mashups (2) I store a copy of many slides on Slideshare The slides can then be embedded and viewed on other Web sites – no downloading needed There’s also an interface in Facebook – so you gain the social networking benefits for free These examples simply need me to copy a HTML fragment to my own Web page 5

Slide 6: How I Use Mashups (3) Blog context can be easily embedded in other applications  Here’s the UK Web Focus blog (with one reader’s comment) .. … and here’s the blog aggregated in the JISC Emerge community (with another comment) Some people feel that content replication can be confusing and fragments discussion. I prefer to maximise access and encourage discussions from multiple communities. 6

Slide 7: How I Use Mashups (4) As well as content, you can integrate communication tools into Web sites Embedded chat tools such as Meebo, Gabbly, etc. are growing in popularity I’ve recently started to experiment with embedded video chat tools, such as TokBox – used at a recent conference to allow a remote speaker to participate in event 7

Slide 8: What I’d Like To See Northumbria University were early users of Google Maps Note how: • Key locations (e.g. for Open Day) shown • Personalised maps can be provided They also have a national map & data for UK Universities (with Northumbria always shown) Should RSCs do likewise, for colleges in their area? 8

Slide 9: Other Examples Other examples of mashups (provided after a Facebook status inviting suggestions): • Community building: Map showing locations of contributors to the Archives Hub service • Country-specific Contacts: Aberdeen University providing links for overseas students to contacts in various countries • Calendar Information: Details of Oxford University’s Continuing Education courses are (a) located on Google Maps and (b) listed on Google Calendar • “They Stole OUr Learning Environment - Now We're Stealing It Back”: Various blog posts describing OU’s work with mashups, Web 2.0, … 9

Slide 10: Not Just Data It’s not just about repurposed data or embedding applications The term mashup has its roots in music cf. I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue’s ‘Lyrics of one tune to tune of another” A video example of this was created by Graham Attwell which juxtaposed: • A JISC cartoon SOA approach to development and • The user’s perspective / informal learning 10

Slide 11: Creating Mashups Yahoo Pipes is a popular tool for bringing mashup creation to the masses. You can: • Explore existing Pipes, use, copy and tweak them • Create new Pipes from scratch See OUseful blog for details of how to do this Other mashup creation tools include PopFly and the Google Mashup Editor 11

Slide 12: Doing It By Hand I create by RSS feeds <item> <title>What Can Mashups Offer?</title> manually: <link>http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/ conferences/rsc-conference-2007/</link> • RSS feed of past & future <guid>http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/ events conferences/rsc-conference-2007/</guid> <description>Brian Kelly will give a talk on \"What • <META> tag for Can Mashups Offer?\" at the \"RSC 3.0\" annual conference at Ramanda Hotel Birmingham on 16 individual events October 2007.</description> Various applications can <geo:lat>52.545043</geo:lat> <geo:long>-1.846733</geo:long> render this data <dc:date>2007-10-16</dc:date> </item> <meta name=\"geo.placename\" content=\"Ramanda Hotel, Birmingham\" /> <meta name=\"geo.position\" content=\"52.545043,-1.846733\" /> <meta name=\"ICBM\" content=\"52.545043,-1.846733\" /> 12

Slide 13: Supporting A Community IWMW 2007 featured an innovation competition which encouraged lightweight development Submissions • Where delegates are from & what they’re blogging about • Edge Hill students provide location of How about: their home town • A mashup competition for colleges in • Newport College your region? have ported their • Use of mashups to support RSC events, VLE to Facebook such as this one? 13

Slide 14: But Why? We’ve seen example of various mashups Can you give some suggestions why mashups can be important? How about: • They allow others to add value to your data - see Paul Walk’s post on “The coolest thing to do with your data will be thought of by someone else” • You can build richer services that you could do one your own, by making use of existing applications • New insights can be provided • It relates to the JISC IE (Information Environment) vision of seamless access to education & research services • ... 14

Slide 15: The Challenges What challenges to deployment of mashups can you envisage? How about • How do we learn how to deploy mashups? • What about the legal obstacles? • Are mashup services sustainable? • What about institutional barriers? 15

Slide 16: Addressing The Challenges (1) Approaches: • Learning: Video, podcasts, tutorials, etc. on tools are available. • Legal barriers: A need for risk assessment and flexibility (and try to provide Creative Commons licences for your resources) • Sustainability: What happens if Google becomes bankrupt (or more realistically, changes its terms & conditions). Again risk assessment and flexibility. • Institutional inertia: Beware the ‘ownership fundamentalist’ who feels the need to own all data and software (more of a problem for HE?) Try things - “seek forgiveness, not permission” 16

Slide 17: Addressing The Challenges (2) But what about: • Firewalls which may block embedded objects? • The accessibility of embedded objects esp. with embedding using Flash or JavaScript? Are these insurmountable barriers, or are there ways to overcome such limitations? 17

Slide 18: Conclusions To conclude: • Mashups are a key part of Web 2.0 • Exploit the notion of ‘the Web as a platform’ – the data and the application can be anywhere • The technical infrastructure is now in place • RSS is important – it’s not just news syndication • An opportunity for experimentations, leading to service deployment 18

Slide 19: Questions Questions are welcome 19