Wikis, mashups and other data access means

1. Wikis, mashups and other data access means September 26, 2007 Ryan Wright For MIS 171

2. History:Information Technology Spend “had” been growing nicely 1971: First Intel Micro 2000: Dot-com collapse 1994: Netscape Navigator 1981: IBM PC 1964: S/360 debuts

3. Crash Just the beginning of a “golden” age Dot.com Collapse - Is it the end? Innovation Deployment The Industrial Revolution Irruption Frenzy Synergy Maturity Panic 1797 Age of Steam and Railways 1 • Formation of Mfg. industry • Repeal of Corn Laws opening trade 1829 1771 Age of Steel, Electricity and Heavy Engineering Panic 1847 2 • Standards on gauge, time • Catalog sales companies • Economies of scale 1873 1829 Depression 1893 Age of Oil, Automobiles and Mass Production 3 • Separation of savings, investment banks • FDIC, SEC 1920 1875 Age of Information and Telecommunications 4 • Build-out of Interstate highways • IMF, World Bank, BIS Crash 1929 1974 1908 Dot.com Collapse 5 Current period of Institutional Adjustment 1971 Source: “Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, Carlota Perez, 2002

4. Today’s Talk • Accessing Data • Wikis • Mashups • Other tools for access

5. Wiki • What is a wiki? • “simplest online database that could work” • Wiki-Wiki bus

6. Projects at a glance The Wikimedia Foundation Inc. is a non-profit corporation aiming to develop and maintain open content, wiki-based projects and provide their full contents to the public free of charge. Wikipedia: an encyclopedia containing more than 3 million articles in over 100 languages Commons: a repository of images, sounds and videos containing more than 400,000 multimedia files Wikinews: a news source containing original reporting by citizen journalists from many countries Wikisource: a collection of published works in the public domain or released under free licenses Wikiquote: a collection of quotations from notable people and creative works Wikibooks: a collection of free educational textbooks and learning materials Wiktionary: a dictionary cataloging meanings, synonyms, etymologies and translations Wikispecies: a directory of species data on all other forms of life (animalia, plantae, fungi, bacteria, archaea, protista)

7. Wikis close to home WSU Wiki MIS curriculum Wiki

8. Key features • The participation of contributors without specific expertise or formal qualifications enriches the projects • Decision-making on the content and editorial policies is done by consensus and occasionally by vote • Wikipedia follows two key rules: NPOV (Neutral Point Of View) and Free licensed content

9. Wikipedia – pros and cons • Pros: • Very fast growth: Wikipedia was born in 2001 and now it contains more than 3 million articles (Encyclopædia Britannica was first published in 1768 and has 120,000 articles) • The number of contributors can be potentially infinite • It’s free of charge • Anyone can fix errors or update an article very quickly • Cons: • Absence of a top-down planning and systematic review process • The quality of articles varies widely and over time • Modifications go directly online: vandalism and inaccurate content can stay online for a while before it gets detected • Coverage of topics and level of detail is not always proportionate to their importance

10. Wikipedia - content dissemination • According to Alexa.com, Wikipedia is the 31st most visited site in the whole Internet • WikiReaders are published collections of Wikipedia articles on a certain topic • German Wikipedia is published also on CD/DVD (other languages edition will be available soon) • Because of the digital divide there is a paper Wikipedia to be distributed in Third world countries

11. How big is Wikipedia Globally? • English – 412,000 articles • German – 172,000 articles • Japanese – 87,000 articles • French – 66,000 articles • Swedish –53,000 articles • Over 1.2 million across 200 languages • 19 with >10,000. 52 with >1000

12. Page History

13. 80/10 Rule • Counting only logged in users, and even excluding some prominent approved bot users • 10 percent of all users make 80% of all edits • 5 percent of all users make 66% of edits • Half of all edits are made by just 2 1/2 percent of all users

14. Problems with wikis • How accurate is the information? • Who is editing the information? • Wikiscanner • Who owns the information?

15. From Simple Data Creation to Access • Wiki create large stores of data • The concept of data is changing • Web 2.0 is the access to data

16. Data Access What does ubiquitous data access mean? How this is done? • Web services Examples of web services? • RSS? • Mashups?

17. Data Access • Internet • Designed for Computer – Human interaction • Visual/text based • Problem • Computer to computer interaction • Solution • Metadata (XML)

18. Metadata • Data about data • Data: 72 • Metadata: inches, Fahrenheit, # of printers

19. Client Device Service Web Services on DevicesDiscovery Probe Resolve MetadataExchange MetadataExchange Resolve: Got an Endpoint? Probe: Printer Hello! Bye! Hello! Hello! ProbeMatch: Hey, I’m a printer! ResolveMatch:Sure do! Hello!

20. Benefits • Uses existing transfer technology • Databases don’t have to reside on site • Don’t have to manage your know database • Allow to create rich applications • Allows for mashups (Discussed later)

21. Examples • Google's Web Service - access the Google search engine • Amazon's Web Service - access Amazon's product information • XMethods - collection of information about existing Web services What is next for web services?

22. Mashup • The term “Mashup” • Mashups Genres • Technologies behind Mashups • Emerging Technical and Social Challenges

23. The term Mashup • Borrowed from the pop music scene • Vocal and instrumental sounds from different source tracks are mixed to form a new “mashup” song • An unusual or innovative composition of content (often from unrelated data sources) • Made for human (rather than computerized) consumption

24. Mashups are… • … an exciting genre of interactive Web applications that • Retrieve content from external data sources • Create entirely new and innovative services • Hallmark of the Web 2.0 • Run-time integration

25. A Simple Example User What are the available flats near WSU? Map with available flats marked Mashup website Request for available flat list Request for area map Area map Flat list Google Map Real estate website

26. What might a Mashup look like? • The ChicagoCrime.org Web site • A mapping mashup • One of the first popular mashups

27. Mashup Genres • Mapping mashups • Video and photo mashups • Search and Shopping mashups • News mashups

28. Mapping Mashups • Locational information presented graphically using maps in a specified context • Google Maps API opened the floodgates; • nuclear disasters • Boston’s CowParade cows onto maps • Other APIs • Microsoft (Virtual Earth) • Yahoo (Yahoo Maps) • AOL (MapQuest)

29. Video and Photo Mashups • Metadata associated with the hosted images and videos • Who took the picture • What it is a picture of • Where and when it was taken • So on… • Facebook

30. Search and Shopping Mashups • Exist long before the term Mashup was coined • Combinations of B2B technologies or screen-scraping to aggregate comparative price data • eBay and Amazon have released APIs for programmatically accessing their content

31. News Mashups • BBC and Reuters have used syndication technologies like RSS and Atom since 2002. • Personalized newspaper by Syndication feed mashups • Doggdot.us, combines feeds from the techie-oriented news sources Digg.com, Slashdot.org and Del.icio.us

32. The architecture • A mashup architecture comprimes of 3 logically and physically disjoint components • API/Content Provider • Mashup Site • Client’s Web Browser • AJAX

33. AJAX • Asynchronous JavaScript and XML • Web application model rather than a specific technology • Asynchronous • “Not at the same time” • JavaScript • XML • metadata

34. Social Challenges • Protection of intellectual property and consumer privacy versus fair-use and the free flow of information

35. Prerequisites • Required • Programming Language • Web Programming • XML Manipulation (XPath, XQuery, etc…) • Recommended • Web authoring tools

36. Examples • Request in HTTP and Response in XML • Example: Google Geocoder • http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?q=XXX • q – The address that you want to geocode • Key – Your API key • Output – The output format • Sample request: • http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?q=1600+amphitheare+mtn+view+ca&key=***&output=xml

37. Demonstration • Googlemap + Craigslist Real Estate • http://www.housingmaps.com/ • Amazon + NLB catalog • http://www.bookjetty.com/ • Source for Others • http://www.programmableweb.com/

38. What’s next • Semantic Web • Interrelating Metadata

39. Semantic Web lives in lives in eats? eats animalType: Carnivore animalType: Reasoner animalType: animalType: Carnivore eats? lives in lives in eats

40. References and Resources • Reference: • Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_(web_application_hybrid) • Tutorial from IBM http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/edu/x-dw-x-ultimashup1.html • Resources: • List of Mashups, APIs: http://www.programmableweb.com/http://www.webmashup.com/

41. Thank you for your attention…