[Myexperiment-discuss] My experiment and Open Social

[Ross Gardler]

I understand that my experiment have some technical barriers to becoming 
an open social container. However, I wonder if you already provide, or 
would be able to provide an API function to generate specific XML data 
for test purposes.

You see, Simal is now a full blown Open Social container. Well, 
theoretically it is "full blown", but in reality I've only actually 
tested the friends data and it doesn't handle authentication yet.

What I would like to do, for the JISC conference, is to show data from 
Simal and data from MyExperiment in the same page within the Simal 
application.

I'm thinking that we can have a gadget that shows friends data derived 
from Simal records [1] and friends data that is contained within 
MyExperiement for the same user.

If/when MyExperiment becomes an Open Social container the same gadgets 
could be embedded in MyExperiement thus extending the range of data 
available to the application.

In order for Simal to do this we need to be able to extract the friends 
data from MyExperiment via an http request. This data would need to be 
provided in the XML format expected of Shindig (the open social 
reference implementation). This is really simple and I'll provide a 
sample if you are happy to do this.

I should point out that the data format has not been agreed yet and 
therefore any implementation we do now should be considered alpha. As 
you know this means the need to modify the code occasionally too. SO, 
it's really up to you to decide on whether this is worth your while.

Longer term I would like to explore more complete data sharing and 
integration opportunities. For example, if someone views a project 
description within Simal I would like to pull workflows descriptions 
produced by that project from MyExperiment. With the same gadgets 
MyExperiment would then be able to show project descriptions from Simal 
that relate to workflows being viewed in MyExperiment.

Ross

[1] Simal friends data is generated from foaf:knows and from 
doap:maintainer, doap:developer etc. entities in project description files.

--
Ross Gardler                           University of Oxford
OSS Watch                              13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN
http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/            t. +44 (0) 1865 283416

Need a meeting? See my availability at http://tinyurl.com/2csbpt