Week 8 - Mashups and API - April 28 - May 1
Whoo hoo! You made it to the last week! Give yourself a pat on the back.
Time to think about mashups… You might be familiar with the concept of “mashing” two things together to form something new. The most common examples come from music and video. For example, here is a mashup commercial of Dolly Parton and Elvis in a car together promoting tourism in Tennessee. I doubt they were ever riding in that car together but through the miracle of modern technology, Dolly and Elvis were able to share a car ride through Tennessee.
Let’s get back to the technology and our Learning 2.0 journey. A mashup is a web application that combines data and/or functionality from more than one source into an entirely new application. Content used in mashups generally comes from a third party via a public interface or API.
An API, or application programming interface, is a set of standardized requests which a software program uses to ask another program to do something. APIs are used by software developers in their source code of their program to open doors of other applications. Remember the UAB Catalog Search Application in Facebook that we tested out in Week 3? API is the reason that application (and many more) exist.
Some examples include:
- The Codex Map database combines a book’s ISBN number with Google maps to allow users to browse for books by setting/location.
- Rollyo (Roll Your Own Search Engine) allows you to search only those sites you select by creating custom Searchrolls – eliminating millions of hits that unrelated to your particular search focus.
- This money track application from Politicalbase.com takes political contribution data from the Federal Election Commission and combines the data with Google maps to display current campaign contributions by state.
- Qlock mashes up world time and Google maps to give you an interactive map indicating the exact time in any location in the world.
So why would you be interested in mashups? I am glad you asked! Here are some mashups in medicine and libraries:
- HubMed - An alternative interface to the PubMed medical literature database
- Go-go Google Gadget - John Blyberg: Google gadget to be used on personal Google pages that displays the hottest items at the library, newest material, your currently checked-out items, and your requested material.
- eTBLAST - eTBLAST: A text similarity-based engine for searching literature collections (to find journals publishing similar research interests, etc)
An introduction to mashups for health librarians
Allan Cho
HubMed: a web-based biomedical literature search interface
Alfred D. Eaton*
eTBLAST: a web server to identify expert reviewers, appropriate journals and similar publications
Mounir Errami,1 Jonathan D. Wren,2 Justin M. Hicks,1 and Harold R. Garner1
QuickStudy: Application Programming Interface (API) (January 10, 2000)
(Listening)
The Library 2.0 Mashup Gang: Podcast
http://talk.talis.com/archives/2006/07/the_library_20_2.html
Discovery Exercise:
Exercise 1 - Pick a mashup… any mashup
- Explore some different examples of Mashups via the winners of Mashup of the day’s Mashup awards: http://mashupawards.com/ or search for a Mashup that interests you at Programmable Web: http://programmableweb.com/. If you need help finding something, try looking at the Most Popular Mashups for suggestions.
- Write about the Mashup you found on your blog.
Exercise 2 - Head over to Rollyo and do the following:
- I am taking you to the “Explore Searchrolls” page to just search Rollyo. Type “librarianblogs” into the search box
- Click the librarianblogs Searchroll. This is a Searchroll that will search select librarian blogs.
- Search for “privacy”
- Browse the results and write something about what these bloggers said about privacy in your blog.
Advanced (Optional): Visit Rollyo http://www.rollyo.com/, and do the following:
- Create login http://www.rollyo.com/register.html
- Create Custom Searchroll that will search Web sites of your choice
- Make newly created Searchroll publicly accessible
- Post link to Searchroll in your blog
April 28th, 2008 at 1:51 am
[…] Gabriel Paul wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptHubMed - An alternative interface to the PubMed medical literature database; Go-go Google Gadget - John Blyberg: Google gadget to be used on personal Google pages that displays the hottest items at the library, newest material, … […]
April 28th, 2008 at 7:14 am
Codex Map is a dead link or something wrong with my computer? Anyone was able to get to the site?
April 28th, 2008 at 7:27 am
I was trying to go through the readings and found “An introduction to mashups for health librarians” was not linked to the document. The URL seemed to link to a PDF file, but no. Please double check and provide the right link.
April 28th, 2008 at 9:35 am
The link for the Alan Cho article is incorrect. I think you forgot to put http:// in front of the link.
April 28th, 2008 at 11:13 am
Hello Lin,
The Codex Map is a live/correct link. Try using this one: http://codexmap.com/codexmap.php
Lin and Jen, the Alan Cho article did not have the “http://” in front of it. Try it again.
Gabe
April 28th, 2008 at 11:46 am
Well, this may be my last post. Still wondering how useful this will all be to me although I am sure I am walking with a better appreciation of this new world. Just not sure of my place in it. Will take some more effort to explore and see how it all fits. What I am sure of is that this format for learning is a real plus for MLA. Kudos to all who made this happen and its been a great ride. Thanks for everything…
For me, I found mapdango.com really cool. The best is that it allows you to look at upcoming events, concerts, etc and then shows you where the venue is on the map. A big plus in a city like Dallas. Also shows the weather, not a bad idea either when planning an outing.
After taking a walkabout on some of the privacy blogs sites, I landed on Fred Stutzman’s site about the information sent when a patron uses the “advanced” features in the Google toolbar. Yikes!!
Deb
April 29th, 2008 at 10:06 am
If you missed it on the HubMed site, check out this cool tool for visually mapping web sites or books…
http://www.touchgraph.com/
April 30th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
Top Ten Most Disruptive Technologies:
#5
Mashups…
“Displaying a front-end assembly model for the cloud, mashups are applications that pull in data from multiple sources. Mashups will be a major force in the next few years, with vendors such as IBM, Serena Software and Microsoft leading the way. The disruptiveness comes in the end-user environment, where business users with little technical ability will be able to create their own mashups and assemble them in dashboards. This will introduce security and privacy challenges for the IT industry.”
http://www.eweek.com
NTM mashlets from JackBe/Presto, plus that 1984-ish mashup with Amazon Books & Google Maps where you can plot the locations of people who’ve bought a certain book, say, 1984…
April 30th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Has anybody been able to upload the link to their Search Roll to their blogg? I tried many times and many different ways to do this, but it is not working. The URL is on my blogg, but it is inactive. Is there something we are supposed to do on Rollyo for this to happen properly? I know this is optional but I like challenges. Sue
April 30th, 2008 at 8:16 pm
I have a similar problem to Susan W, except I don’t know what my URL is. Can I just add a “link” as you did for the librarianblogs? Thanks. Great course - and I did it all through a dial-up connection on an old laptop. I do wonder what happened to all of our links on the MLA wiki page however. Should we be concerned? Finally, I hope MLA makes this course (and more to come) available to all MLA members. pam
April 30th, 2008 at 10:19 pm
Susan and Pamela,
Here is a short Jing video that will show you how to find the link to your Rollyo search engine. http://screencast.com/t/VVWeyZDt
Susan - for your blog… if you are in the WYSIWYG editor you will need to paste the URL, highlight it, and then locate a chain icon (or something that means create a link) in the tool bar. Click on this and it will ask you for the URL. If you want to tell me what blog service you are using I can do a quick Jing video.
May 1st, 2008 at 2:48 pm
[…] 1, 2008 by universitylibrarian This week is cool-all about mash-ups. A lot of geography! Boy do people find Google Maps […]
May 2nd, 2008 at 7:08 pm
Thanks Gabe - do you know how hard it is to watch a short video on a dial-up connection? Luckily I found my URL: http://rollyo.com/pvanhine/womens_health/
Thanks
pam