Amia 2011: Using OpenSocial to Leverage a Community of Developers
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This document discusses using OpenSocial to leverage developers in building applications for research networking tools and platforms. It describes OpenSocial as an open standard API that allows applications to run on social web platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and UCSF Profiles. The document argues that making research tools into web platforms using OpenSocial can accelerate science by leveraging a community of developers to quickly build and deliver more features. It presents OpenSocial as a good choice for becoming a web platform and discusses next steps of growing the Open Research Networking Gadgets Community.
Amia 2011: Using OpenSocial to Leverage a Community of Developers
- 1. Eric Meeks (UCSF) Leslie Yuan (UCSF) Griffin Weber (Harvard) Mini Kahlon (UCSF) Using OpenSocial to Leverage a Community of Developers •*Profiles Research Networking Software
- 2. What is OpenSocial? • An Open Standard API for running applications on social web platforms. What’s a social web platform? • LinkedIn, Facebook, UCSF Profiles, Nature Network SlideShare, WordPress Blogs, Farmville and Faculty Mentoring are examples of web applications or gadgets that run on these platforms
- 3. Why make our Research Networking Tools Web Platforms? • Platforms rock. As a platform you can leverage a community of developers to build applications for your system independently and simultaneously. • Delivering more features more quickly to our researchers will accelerate science.
- 4. Is OpenSocial a Good Way to Become a Web Platform? “Don’t believe the hype” – Flavor Flav
- 5. Why OpenSocial is a Great Choice Apache Shindig!
- 11. An Open Community for Application Sharing UCSF Harvard LinkedIn iGoogle Stanford VIVO Profiles Profiles OpenSocial Gadget Library
- 12. Ned: Steve, are we allowed in here? Steve: It's a scientific community, man.
- 14. Next Steps • Convince the enterprise community (which believes in OpenSocial) that RDF is a good thing. • Convince the medical informatics community (which believes in RDF) that OpenSocial is a good thing. • Grow the Open Research Networking Gadgets Community (ORNG)!
- 15. Thanks! • Harvard Catalyst • Andy Bowline (Wake Forest Medical Center) • The Apache Shindig Team • Andy Smith (IBM), Mark Weitzel (IBM) and the OpenSocial Foundation • MIT & The Simile Project
Editor's Notes
- #3: Web sites where you can connect with other peopleAND you can run external applications within the canvas of the siteWe call them gadgetsThere are thousands of these out on the internet. Search for “”linkedin apps” and you’ll find a good listShow this: http://www.linkedin.com/static?key=application_directory
- #4: “A platform beats an application every time” Tim O’Reilly Platforms scale to unlimited feature growth because people can add new features to your system without having to touch the source code of your system.Our belief is that “delivering more features more quickly to our researchers will accelerate science”Different apps may resonate with different researchers and that’s OK, because we can deliver a lot of them and it isn’t too expensive. Get’s free with the communityHopefully shown why being a platform is a good.
- #5: Yes! But I do get asked this at times.Found out about the Hype Curve at an AMIA keynote last year!Explain features of the curve..OpenSocial has taken a ride on the hype curve. I think it’s now on the slope of enlightenment.Where OpenSocial is now. OS 2.0 released August 18th. Focusing on enterprise/intranet front where people are using Social Network features to enhance productivity through collaboration tools. Get cool new features with 2.0 such as OpenSearch and Mobile integration.http://blog.opensocial.org/2011/08/announcing-release-of-opensocial-20.htmlhttp://www.imaginea.com/opensocialMany good technologies have taken this ride (point out semantic web). Java (up), applets (down), servletsFinal word, “Don’t believe the hype”
- #6: Why OpenSocial is a good choice part 2Apache Shindig is the reference implementation of the open social standard & serves as a code library to convert a web site to a web platform. 200K lines of code, free for you to useLifted from poster. Main point: building a social web platform is complicated! Look at the number of arrows and boxes and this is greatly simplified. Facebook has the resources to build all of this from scratch, but we don’t.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slaI565TYE0Show video, which a) is cool; and b) shows you all the work being pored into Shindig that you can benefit from for free!. BTW, this isn’t happening in real time?
- #7: You know what open social is and what it means to be a web platform, and you know why we chose open social. Let’s see some examples:MentoringWebsites (makes our site not competitive with UCSF departmental sites)
- #8: Integrating with Saleforce Chatter for Facebook/Twitter like activity streamsCan post on my phone and have it show up on my profileUsing this for group formation as well, shopping cart to gather researchers and produce an email list or a Chatter group, which is sort of like an internal Yahoo group of people.Stanford is doing the same thing. Further along than us, sent out an email yesterday
- #9: Hey, this isn’t us?Gave our code which integrates Profiles to Shindig to make it OpenSocial enabled to Wake Forest and they started cranking out gadgets immediately.Gadgets can be very simple, some are just 100 lines or so of HTML and Javascript packaged in XML.Others have server side components
- #10: Built in < 2 days by Andy Bowline!Scrapes NIH Reporter nightly and puts content into a search engine, Gadget does search based on a persons research interest
- #11: Hey look at this! We have it running at UCSFPerpetual motion: producing more energy than we consumeOurs runs against the Wake Forest service in real time.“research area” is not a built in part of the OpenSocial specification (which you can extend) . Wake Forest created a custom API to flow this data into the gadget, we reused an existing API we had and had to change a couple of lines (literally) of the gadget code.With RDF, would not need to change those couple of lines of code.Great for us since we are moving to RDF! Prototype with Babel (see poster) converting RDF to JSONWorking to convince OpenSocial foundation that RDF is a good “option”
- #12: Taken from an earlier presentation but now this is really happening!Mentor app was ported to mobile about a year ago during an OpenSocial conference.Andy Smith of IBM.
- #13: All of our work is available for others to take. It’s OK to take it. Working to release this under a BSD licenseFirst “community” site, by nerds for nerdsUgly site with an even uglier URL (note the –s and even double –s)However, lots of good info on this site along with tons of source code.
- #14: A less ugly site with URL you might actually be able to remember
- #15: Realize RDF and the use of ontologies to describe your data domain isn’t going to work for everyone but for those (like us) where it does work, make it an officialoption in OpenSocial.Upcoming conference call with the OpenSocial foundation where we want to talk about RDF & Ontologies as a solution for “domain impedance” issues. We’ve extended Shindig with Babel & it’s very clean.Part 2 is what we’re doing right now in this conference. Look at what Andy Bowline did in a short amount of time. Nothing exclusive about open social. Do things your old way and make it a gadget as well (easy if it’s a web service). For example, NIH biosketch generator from VIVO data (hint hint)He’s working on an NIH Biosketch gadget as wellThe intersection of the OpenSource & RDF/LOD community is us. Tried drawing a venn diagram with Yellow & Red circles and an Orange overlap, but it looked to much like the master card logo