Mashups… …Recycling Data

As a simple example…  Click on  Videos that are uploaded individually over time are collected on one site  They are re-organized  The original location is referenced with a url  Or, look at and at the embedded blogshttp://rogerking.me

What is a mashup?  No rigid definition, sometimes called “remixing”  The focus is on information, data, and to a lesser extent, services.  A mashup takes information and services and brings them together in a way that, hopefully, creates a sum- bigger-than-the-parts  Systems used to develop mashups include Flash Builder, Ruby on Rails, Wordpress, content management systems like Joomla and Drupal.

The key component  The web is becoming more interconnected and more “processed”  Websites are more interconnected and fewer sites are simply one way downloads of data  A mashup can be a website or a desktop app – or combined

Data sharing  Data includes  news, commentaries, videos, etc., etc.  As well as a growing use of warehoused and minded data  Farmed from  TV broadcasts, Vimeo, Youtube, etc.  Images off web pages  Text and ideas from blogs and websites  Printed news that originates on paper or online  Podcasts  Spam and targeted  Twitter and Facebook

How data is recycled  Links  Publicly available APIs  Web services  RSS and other feeds  Web based office document bases that are partially shared   http

Problems  Lots of un-processed information that is simply being repeated over and over, making the Web even bigger and harder to use  Lots of violations of copyrights, etc.  A sense of anonymousness that leads to information that is unintentionally or deliberately incorrect, mean spirited, etc.

Important  Reuse can we automated  Or it can be manual  Or it can be manual and conceptual … imagine if the semantic web actually existed…

Examples   Uses police data  Locates crimes on Google maps  Provides for filtering by users   Satellite data from Microsoft and Yahoo  Focused on maps from different sources  =eng =eng  Information from many sources - emergencies

More examples   Pulls in reverse phone data  Pulls in address data  … tries to sell you more data!  Non-public and partially public mashups  Used by companies, government agencies, etc., up to date on internal news  A one-stop way of staying in the loop  Insiders have special logins to see special information  Try

Tailoring  Often a mashup gives user control over content and form  What news feeds  What “skin” to use  What format to use –    Shows a growing trend toward smart search engines   Events happening locally

Relationship to topics already covered  Locating, translating, and integrating heterogeneous data  The semantic web  Web 2.0/3.0  Unconventional data management systems  Website development technologies  Information visualization  Manipulating data on client side

Challenges  This is creating even more varied and diverse heterogeneous data sources – what we need is some consolidation of technologies for information integration that includes creating mashups  Making large grained semantic use of web page content  The semantic web… ?  More focused: widgets, small web components that can be copied and pasted  Making them legal, safe, secure, private, and accurate – and profitable  Accessing the large bulk of web data – most is still hidden

More challenges  Creating more effective use of user-supplied data  Using mashups more aggressively than just as information sources – collaborations and group coordination  Larger grained software technology – right now, it is as tough as building any website with dynamic pages  Would be nice to make their construction quick and cheap  Fluidity is what we need  Supporting content manipulation on client side  Manipulating images, video, audio, etc.

A related technology: portals  Perhaps just an improvement in development technology  But a portal is less dynamic, does not generally support client side manipulation of data, and usually does not support the manipulation of advanced forms of data

Other legal issues  There is a legal notion of “fair use”  There is a growing trend toward considering information unprotected  Sometimes very valuable information is being stolen… remember bit torrent and file sharing…?  Entire books  Marketing information  Growing use of peer to peer technology to evade centralized detection

Lastly  There is another kind of mashup… 