Amia 2011: Using OpenSocial to Leverage a Community of Developers

Eric Meeks (UCSF)Leslie Yuan (UCSF)Griffin Weber (Harvard)Mini Kahlon (UCSF)

Using OpenSocial to Leverage a Community of Developers

• *Profiles Research Networking Software

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

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.

Is OpenSocial a Good Way to Become a Web Platform?

“Don’t believe the hype” – Flavor Flav

Why OpenSocial is a Great Choice

Apache Shindig!

An Open Community forApplication Sharing

OpenSocial Gadget Library

UCSF

Profiles

Harvard

ProfilesLinkedIn iGoogle Stanford VIVO

Ned: Steve, are we allowed in here?Steve: It's a scientific community, man.

http://opengadgets.org

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)!

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