Clinical and TranslationalScience Institute / CTSIat the University of California, San Francisco

Open Research Networking Gadgets (ORNG)www.orng.info

But First….

• What is a Research Networking Tool?– “at UCSF, it’s basically like LinkedIn for biomedical

researchers”

• What is Linked Open Data?– Web pages that computers and people can read

and understand

• What is OpenSocial?– An API for adding web applications (gadgets) into

a social or research networking web site

Evolution of Social and Research Networking

• Social Networking is recognized as a powerful means of online collaboration

• Facebook dominates the consumer space, OpenSocial moves to the enterprise space

• Research Networking Tools adopt Linked Open Data (LOD) and the VIVO ontology

• We combine the VIVO data standard with the OpenSocial application standard -> ORNG

What is ORNG?

• An extension made to both the Profiles RNS and VIVO research networking tools to allow them to run Linked Open Data/OpenSocial applications (ORNG gagets)

• And of course, the collection of ORNG gadgets themselves: www.orng.info

How did we build ORNG?http://profiles.ucsf.edu/eric.meeks

An Ontology Driven Approach to Improve the OpenSocial Standard

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

Problem

Introduction NIH Grant Match* and Recommended Reading* Gadgets using researcher data obtained with different custom API’s• Science 2.0 is happening, and Research Networking Tools such as

Profiles, VIVO, SciVal Experts and others have become commonplace throughout our institutions.

• Our Research Networking Tools fulfill a need that can not be met by commercial social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+ because we need institutional provenance for our data content and first class support for our data model.

• Commercial social networking sites have become platforms. This allows them to leverage numerous development communities and more rapidly deliver innovative functionality.

• Our Research Networking Tools should also become platforms. We believe that delivering more functionality more quickly to our researchers will increase productivity and accelerate science.

DIRECT Match Gadget using researcher data obtained with VIVO RDF via JSON

Browser

Babel

OpenSocial with RDF/XML converted to JSON via Simile Babel

Approach

Gadget Content Gadget Hosting Servershttp://anywhere/gadget.xml

RD

F/X

ML

HTML ContentOR*

JSON Domain Data

Domain Object Request

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 Bowline of Wake Forest, MIT Libraries and MIT CSAIL as well as all other contributors to the SIMILE Project.

We also want to thank Andy Smith and the OpenSocial Foundation.

• Converting a web site to a web platform is not trivial. It can be done independently by a large software development team, or it can be done by leveraging existing open source solutions such as Apache Shindig.

• The software resources available to our institutions are limited as compared to a recognizable commercial site such as Facebook or LinkedIn. Apache Shindig, which is based on the OpenSocial standard, is the more attractive if not only viable solution.

• The OpenSocial standard does not have first class support for our data model. Fortunately OpenSocial is extendable and this gives us an opportunity to address our specific data model needs.

* Successfully tested with VIVO (ask for demo!) but not yet implemented.

Gadget Specification

Backend Services

Request Proxy

* Built by Andy Bowline of theWake Forest School of Medicine.

• Manually extending OpenSocial with custom fields to match our data model was always an option but an expensive one from a development perspective and a flawed one because customization breaks interoperability.

• Convergence towards RDF and the VIVO ontology across our Research Networking Tools presented an opportunity. With a standard ontology we now have a standard way to express our data, but how can we integrate the VIVO ontology into OpenSocial?

• OpenSocial works well with JSON but not with any standard serialized forms of RDF such as RDF/XML or Turtle. A standard means of converting RDF to JSON was required.

Next Steps

• Integrate our solution into the RDF based version of Profiles and make our code available to the open source community.

• Promote our solution to the OpenSocial Foundation. Other verticals are suffering from the same domain based data model issues with OpenSocial that we encountered in bioinformatics.

• Get you to help us build our community for Open Research Networking Gadgets (ORNG) at http://opengadgets.org!

Solution

• An open source product called Babel which was developed by the MIT Simile Project was discovered. Babel provides many data translation services, including RDF/XML to JSON.

• A proof of concept system was created by integrating the production UCSF Profiles code with pre-release VIVO compliant Profiles code, and integrating Babel with Apache Shindig.

• The DIRECT Match Gadget was built to test the proof of concept system. It worked! It has also been successfully unit tested with RDF/XML from various external VIVO compliant sources.

The.

Ontology.

RDF/XML converted to JSON for Griffin Weber

An Analysis of Social and Research Networking

Open Source

RNTs

Detailed User Profile

Personalized Content

Online Collaboration

Detailed User Profile

• Researchers do many things: their data is dynamic and all over the web

Tweets

Presentations on slideshare

Videos on YouTube

Code on GitHub

• ORNG strengthens RNTs by aggregating and presenting researcher data in “real time” from multiple web sources

Personalized Content

• Andy Bowline of Wake Forest has done a great job with ORNG in addressing this need– Recommended Readings Gadget– Funding Opportunities Gadget

• UCSF partnered with Ying Ding of Indiana University to have students prototype an ORNG “relevancy” engine

Online Collaboration

RNTs have the data and connections; industry tools have the collaborative functionality. ORNG brings the two together.

•UCSF integrated Salesforce Chatter into Profiles

•Added “Follow in Chatter” and “Create a group in Chatter” capabilities to Profiles

– The data trail from creating a group is fantastic

Next Steps

• Bring ORNG into formal Profiles release

• Store OpenSocial data in local RDF (makes it searchable)

• Store external metadata in local RDF (searchable)

• JSON-LD for gadgets and beyond

• Make RDF feature an official part of OpenSocial

• Extend RDF feature with VIVO ontology specific feature

• Honorable discharge for redundant gadgets

• Explore Apache Rave

• Build more gadgets! => You and us!

Join the ORNG movement!

www.orng.info•Mailing list

•App store

•Support

eric.meeks@ucsf.edu

Eric Meeks, Brian Turner, Anirvan Chatterjee, Leslie Yuan