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Using OpenSocial to Build a Shareable Library of Research Applications

Eric Meeks (UCSF), Leslie Yuan (UCSF), Griffin Weber (Harvard), Maninder Kahlon (UCSF)

Clinical and Translational Science Institute, University of California, San FranciscoHarvard Catalyst, The Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center

• Social networking has grown rapidly on the Internet and is now a fundamental component of the online experience. Translational science has not been blind to this phenomenon and the value of social networking as a mechanism for discovery has been recognized in our field.

• Numerous research networking tools such as Profiles Research Networking Tool and VIVO have been built and deployed at our institutions. These tools use data mining and social networking to showcase researchers for the primary goal of expertise mining.

• The value of research networking tools can go beyond discovery and expertise mining. Social networks are ideal as platforms for applications focused on communication and collaboration because the networks contain rich information of the participating individuals as well as their connections.

Introduction

Abstract

• The vast majority of commercial social networking sites have become technical platforms with published APIs that allow independently developed applications to run withintheir web site. Google, LinkedIn, MySpace and others recognized the value in having a standard API for this purpose, and thus created OpenSocial.

• OpenSocial is an API for bringing applications to users across various websites. In OpenSocial the applications are gadgets and the websites are containers. The OpenSocial API is a standard that allows any gadget to run in any container with little or no modification.

• The Harvard Catalyst-developed Profiles application allows us to take the advances in communication and discovery that are core to social networking sites and begin to utilize them to improve the research collaboration processes. UCSF has extended Profiles to become an OpenSocial container and is building out a library of gadgets.

Results Results (continued)

Acknowledgments

This project was supported by NIH/NCRR UCSF-CTSI Grant Number UL1 RR024131 and Harvard Catalyst Grant Number 1 UL1 RR025758-01. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH.

We would like to thank Andy Smith and Mark Weitzel of the OpenSocial Foundation, as well as Justin Kruger and Nels Johnson, our gadget development team.

Discussion

• We are in conversations with other institutions who would like to partner with us, both by installing gadgets (such as mentorship management) in their own Profiles installation, and by developing new functionality as gadgets so that their work can serve institutions beyond their own. We are engaged in ongoing conversations with the OpenSocial foundation on how to best influence the API to increase its value to the health sciences community.

• Additionally, we are in the early stages of discussion with research networking tools other than Profiles to promote and assist in the adoption of the OpenSocial standard within health sciences.

• Finally, we will create a library of these gadgets with the intent that other institutions can freely take from and contribute to the library.

As academic institutions, we are eager to share technology to elevate the overall state of translational bioinformatics. However, differences in technical infrastructure often force us to develop separate software solutions to address the same problem. Many applications that we build are tightly bound to our data and infrastructure, resulting in un-shareable proprietary solutions. OpenSocial can solve this problem. Research networking tools such as Profiles and VIVO are becoming standard at our institutions. We extended UCSF’s installation of the Profiles Research Networking Tool to let it run applications built on the OpenSocial API, supported by Google, LinkedIn, etc. This allows us to find and create applications that can be shared with other research networking tools that adopt the OpenSocial standard, despite underlying differences in technical infrastructure and platform. Social networking sites in industry have proven the benefits of OpenSocial. We are bringing these benefits to academic research.

Methods

• UCSF has extended Profiles to become an OpenSocial container by integrating Profiles with Shindig, a product maintained by the ApacheSoftware Foundation. Shindig is an open source Java product that is the reference standard for the OpenSocial API.

• The OpenSocial Foundation provided technical assistance in setting up our Integrated Development Environment (Eclipse) and build automation (Apache Maven).

• Integration researcher data at UCSF was accomplished by building an extension into Shindig to access the XML based web service provided by Profiles. Integrating through the web service provides a level of insulation from changes in the underlying Profiles SQL Server data schema while layering in the Profiles security model for data access.

• User interface integration was achieved by creating a set of JavaScriptlibraries based on the example code in the Shindig source. Fortunately no middleware integration was required, thus differences in programming language between Profiles (C#/.NET) and Shindig(Java) were of minimal issue.

Browser Apache Shindig

Profiles XML

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Profiles OpenSocial Architecture

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* Planned for Profiles 1.0 Release

• We have built and deployed several gadgets (e.g., for mentorship management, presentation sharing, Google Site Search, etc.), two of which are live in production as of Feb 28th 2011.

• Building functionality as gadgets is relatively inexpensive. Our SlideShare gadget is only 702 lines of code and can be seen at http://profiles.ucsf.edu/gadgets/SlideShare.xml. Our Full Text Search gadget is less than 140 lines of code and can be found at http://profiles.ucsf.edu/gadgetsGoogleSearch.xml. The gadget source code is an XML package of JavaScript and HTML that can include other web objects if needed (Flash, images, etc.)

• We are working with the Harvard Profiles development team to integrate our work into their product so that other institutions that have installed Profiles can both benefit from and participate in our efforts to build out a library of bioinformatics gadgets.

• It is our goal to create a library of research oriented gadgets. Over 17,000 OpenSocial applications can be found at http://directory.opensocial.org and we will create our library by finding or altering existing gadgets, building our own when necessary, and soliciting the open source community which could include you!

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