Open Research Networking Gadgets (ORNG)

Research Networking through Social Technologies

Eric Meeks, Brian Turner, Anirvan Chatterjee, Leslie Yuan

Clinical and Translational Science Institute, University of California, San Francisco

Clinical and Translational Science Institute / CTSI Accelerating Research to Improve Health

This project was supported by NIH/NCRR UCSF-CTSI Grant Number UL1 TR000004

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.

Join ORNG!

http://orng.info

Introduction Open Research Networking Gadgets, or ORNG, refers to a

technology standard supported by both the VIVO and Harvard

Catalyst Profiles RNS research networking tools. With ORNG,

institutions can develop and install independent applications to

add features to their research networking tool without having to

alter the source code of the tool itself. Being standards-based,

these applications can run in either the VIVO or Profiles

system. The ORNG standard was developed by UCSF by

combining the industry-created OpenSocial application

standard with the VIVO-supported Linked Open Data standard.

In development, this required integrating the research

networking platform (VIVO and Profiles) into the Apache

Shindig OpenSocial engine, and extending OpenSocial to

support Linked Data through JSON and later JSON-LD. The

ORNG applications themselves are built in Javascript and

HTML, and the ORNG framework provides functionality ranging

from data persistence, to serializing semantic data into JSON,

to authenticated access into external web services. As a full

application standard, numerous features can be built with

ORNG, but in practice we have found that the greatest value

comes in using ORNG to integrate with other web sites and

services.

Gadget Hosting Servers

http://anywhere/gadget.xml

ShindigORNG

Tomcat

Profiles or

VIVO

Profile HTML RDF/XML

ga

dg

et.

xm

l

The ORNG applications run as iframes within the browser. Note

that the ORNG content will be seen by the browser as coming

from http://[RNT URL]/shindigorng, this allows the Javascript in

the ORNG gadgets to avoid security issues with cross site

scripting.

The RDF/XML is consumed by ShindigORNG and converted to

JSON-LD*, where it is then piped through to the browser as a

component of the ORNG content. The ORNG Gadgets are

written in HTML and Javascript, hence the need for JSON based

data. Note that RDF/XML from other servers can also be

accessed by ShindigORNG and converted to JSON-LD.

Web services used by ORNG applications will all be proxied

through ShindigORNG (and IIS when needed) and can optionally

use OAuth if some level of security is required (as with KNODE).

Internal or External

Web Service

(SlideShare, YouTube,

Wake Forest Grant

Search, KNODE,

Chatter Proxy, etc.)

We

b C

on

ten

t

[OA

uth

]

Researcher Content from

Social Media ORNG applications allow us to make our researcher profiles

more complete by bringing in external researcher content in

“real time” that isn’t captured by our current research

networking tools. This includes multimedia data that is best

handled by sites that are specifically designed for managing

certain types of content (YouTube for videos, SlideShare for

presentations), as well as rapidly changing data that demands

real-time integration to have value (Twitter for tweets). It is

important to note that in these cases, the content itself is not

easy to harvest in RDF form because it’s either non-textual or

needed immediately. However, metadata about the content

could (and should) find a place in the ontologies used by our

research networking tools. We are in early discussions with

both the VIVO and Profiles teams to make this possible.

Research Collaboration Support for online collaboration, be it for work or for play, is an

expected component of social networking. With ORNG, we are

bringing online collaborative capabilities into our research

networking tools. At UCSF we have integrated Salesforce Chatter

enterprise social networking into our research networking platform

via ORNG. This integration allows researchers to “follow” one

another from within Profiles, as well as to create Chatter Groups

for performing online collaboration. Adding these capabilities into

our researcher tools through real time integration to a 3rd party

service is important for a number of reasons:

• We don’t want to rebuild complex groupware functionality that

has already been built, nor do we want to depend entirely on an

external service that would require us to export our data into a

3rd party system that cannot house the richness of our

information.

• Online collaborations that are generated from our research

networking tools will have a complete data trail, allowing us to

better measure the impact of our tools.

• Many of our research networking tools are locally installed, as

this gains the benefit of provenance. But we do not want our

collaborations to be limited to our local institutions.

With ORNG, we can integrate our local research networking tools

with shared services such as Chatter, Jive, or Dropbox. This will

allow us to facilitate inter-institutional online collaborations, a

recognized critical need for advancing medical research.

Architecture and Methods

360°View of a Researcher

Web Server

IIS or Tomcat

ORNG Content (HTML, Javascript, JSON/JSON-LD*)

IIS Proxy

* JSON-LD in Profiles 2.0,

varying JSON in other systems