1. 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 Francisco
Harvard Catalyst, The Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center
Introduction NIH Grant Match* and Recommended Reading* Gadgets using DIRECT Match Gadget using researcher Solution
• Science 2.0 is happening, and Research Networking Tools such as
researcher data obtained with different custom API’s data obtained with VIVO RDF via JSON
• An open source product called Babel which was developed by the
Profiles, VIVO, SciVal Experts and others have become
MIT Simile Project was discovered. Babel provides many data
commonplace throughout our institutions.
translation services, including RDF/XML to JSON.
• Our Research Networking Tools fulfill a need that can not be met by
• A proof of concept system was created by integrating the production
commercial social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook and
UCSF Profiles code with pre-release VIVO compliant Profiles code,
Google+ because we need institutional provenance for our data
and integrating Babel with Apache Shindig.
content and first class support for our data model.
• The DIRECT Match Gadget was built to test the proof of concept
• Commercial social networking sites have become platforms. This
system. It worked! It has also been successfully unit tested with
allows them to leverage numerous development communities and
RDF/XML from various external VIVO compliant sources.
more rapidly deliver innovative functionality.
• Our Research Networking Tools should also become platforms. We
believe that delivering more functionality more quickly to our RDF/XML converted to JSON for Griffin Weber
researchers will increase productivity and accelerate science.
Problem
• Converting a web site to a web platform is not trivial. It can be done
* Built by Andy Bowline of the
independently by a large software development team, or it can be
Wake Forest School of Medicine.
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 OpenSocial with RDF/XML converted to JSON via Simile Babel
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.
Browser Backend Services
Approach
OR*
• Manually extending OpenSocial with custom fields to match our data Next Steps
HTML Content
model was always an option but an expensive one from a
development perspective and a flawed one because customization • Integrate our solution into the RDF based version of Profiles and
breaks interoperability. make our code available to the open source community.
RDF/XML
• Convergence towards RDF and the VIVO ontology across our • Promote our solution to the OpenSocial Foundation. Other verticals
Research Networking Tools presented an opportunity. With a are suffering from the same domain based data model issues with
standard ontology we now have a standard way to express our data, OpenSocial that we encountered in bioinformatics.
but how can we integrate the VIVO ontology into OpenSocial?
• Get you to help us build our community for Open Research
• OpenSocial works well with JSON but not with any standard Domain Object Request Request Proxy Networking Gadgets (ORNG) at http://opengadgets.org!
serialized forms of RDF such as RDF/XML or Turtle. A standard Babel
means of converting RDF to JSON was required.
JSON Domain Data Acknowledgments
The. This project was supported by NIH/NCRR UCSF-CTSI Grant Number
Gadget Content Gadget UL1 RR024131 and Harvard Catalyst Grant Number 1 UL1 RR025758-
Specification Gadget Hosting Servers 01. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not
http://anywhere/gadget.xml necessarily represent the official views of the NIH.
We would like to thank Andy Bowline of Wake Forest, MIT Libraries and
Ontology. MIT CSAIL as well as all other contributors to the SIMILE Project.
* Successfully tested with VIVO (ask for demo!) but not yet implemented.
We also want to thank Andy Smith and the OpenSocial Foundation.