2007-05-20 Web2.0 and Mashup Unidata e-letter

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Title: Web 2.0, Mashups and the Unidata System Date: May 20, 2007 Location: Unidata Report Formats: [ PPT] | [ Screencast] Word | [ PDF]

Web 2.0, Mashups and the Unidata Community

Rudolf B. Husar and Erin M. Robinson, Washington University in St. Louis

The contents of cyberspace are increasingly generated and distributed by individuals. This is as manifested by the explosive growth of web-based social software like wikis, picture-sharing services and blogs. This architectural, technological and cultural transformation of the Internet, commonly referred to asWeb 2.0, is good news for the Unidata community since it offers new possibilities for sharing and harvesting community-provided content as well as collaboratively creating new things. In this note we share a few of our early experiences incorporating the new, participatory Internet into our research using the May 2007 Georgia Fires as a use case.

The fires in southern Georgia began in late April 2007 and continued throughout May. Initial event analysis began with filtering and harvesting user-contributed web content. The Google Blog Search of 'Florida smoke' returned several thousand entries, many of them unrelated to the wildfires. Visually scanning the blog entries yielded a number of interesting posts, which were bookmarked and tagged '070508+Florida+Smoke' in the social bookmarking tool del.icio.us. Additional smoke photos were found in the photo-sharing service,Flickr. Together, these tools yielded a rich but only qualitative description of the Georgia Fires.

The tools and methods of quantitative analysis are also changing. Large monolithic, 'do-it-all' software tools are giving way to web service modules, combined through service chaining. Application software can now be created using Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The DataFed air quality analysis applications are built using web services and workflow integration software. For the Georgia Smoke analysis, this meant easy data access, processing and viewing of federated smoke-related datasets. Service orientation not only lowers the entry resistance for service providers, but it also allows the creation of unanticipated, user-defined applications or mashups. One of the most impressive mashups is Weather Bonk, an integration of many services including Weather Service Forecasts, webcams, Yahoo Geocoding/Maps/Traffic and Google Maps.

Wikis, originally used to collaboratively write and discuss documents, are now also used as a general user-defined workspace to organize web content and as a client for mashups through incorporation of RSS feeds, Google Maps, structured data etc. The Georgia Smoke Event wiki page is an example of this functionality, containing structured metadata which describes the event in a standard way, links to harvesting queries, data resources viewable in Google Earth as well as providing an event summary written and discussed collaboratively by the community.

As this short teaser shows, the entry resistance to any particular Web 2.0 application is rather low. A clear challenge to the Earth Science community is determining how to apply these tools in research and education.

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• See also Collaborative_Document_Production
• See also Collaboration_tools
• See alsoCollaboration_Tools_and_Technologies
• Preparation material has been moved to: 2007-05-20 Web2.0 and Mashup Unidata e-letter/Background