Week 8: Mashups and API (August 11-17)

Week 8 of Web 2.0: Introduction to Second Generation Web Tools.

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. Often as you use a website you are unaware you are using a mashup. If you see data that comes from more than one place, like maps from Google and money from another source, suchs as the thrid example below, the API is making that happen.

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)

Optional Reading Exercise:

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

1. 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.
2. Write about the Mashup you found on your blog.

Exercise 2 – Head over to Rollyo and do the following:

1. We are taking you to the “Explore Searchrolls” page to just search Rollyo. Type “librarianblogs” into the search box
2. Click the librarianblogs Searchroll. This is a Searchroll that will search select librarian blogs.
3. Search for “privacy”
4. 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:

1. Create login http://www.rollyo.com/register.html
2. Create Custom Searchroll that will search Web sites of your choice
3. Make newly created Searchroll publicly accessible
4. Post link to Searchroll in your blog

REMINDER: Make sure you report each week’s assignment with the activity tracking report.

Participants will have two more weeks to complete course exercises. Web 2.0: Introduction to Second Generation Web Tools officially ends on August 31st. Participants who have completed all assignments will receive a USB flash drive for your hard work.

HOWEVER…

Most of you are not tracking! We have over 80 students and very few tracking records as per this fuzzy chart.

Why track, even at this late date? You will get a USB Flash Drive!  We will have a record of how many people actually took the course. In this learning environment, we have no way of know who is doing what. We are  not going to be able to check everyone’s work. We are on the honor system. Do some reading, do some looking around. Learn about the technology. AND TRACK! (by August 31)

Your course instructors, Shandra and Roz

As a wrapup, we like to present this YouTube video: Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us. It’s moving fast but see if you can keep up and use all those words you have learned in these 8 weeks. Where do you think Web 2.0 is going?

Advertisement

Tags: api, application_programming_interface, mashup