cool animations for maps.
[From A List Apart: Articles: SVG with a little help from Raphaël]
Archive for Mashups
assertTrue( ): OpenCalais-OpenOffice mashup
assertTrue( )
Techno-cruft from around the Web, plus really pithy observations about Java and other future legacy technologies. Yes, pithy I say.Thursday, February 05, 2009
OpenCalais-OpenOffice mashup
OpenCalais is one of the most innovative and potentially disruptive online services to hit the Web in recent memory. To understand its importance, you have to be a bit of a geek, preferably a text-analytics or computational-linguistics geek, maybe an information-access or “search” geek, or a reasonably technical content-technology freak who understands the potential uses of metadata. It’s not easy to sum up OpenCalais in a few words. Suffice it to say, though, if you haven’t heard of OpenCalais before, you should visit http://www.opencalais.com. It’s an interesting undertaking, to be sure.One of the services OpenCalais exposes is automatic extraction of entity metadata from text. If you call the OpenCalais service using the proper arguments, you can essentially pass it any kind of t [From assertTrue( ): OpenCalais-OpenOffice mashup]
HCI at Stanford University: Ubicomp Mashups
HCI at Stanford University: Ubicomp Mashups:
Ubicomp Mash-Up: “ A combination of existing technologies, glued together to achieve new functionality, as opposed to creating that functionality from scratch.”
We have conducted fieldwork to characterize mash-up practices in different communities (specifically, hardware hackers, web2.0 programmers, and ubicomp designers).
Anil Dash: Yahoo Pipes
Anil Dash: Yahoo Pipes: interesting review of Yahoo! new pipes service.
Google maps meet weather information
Weather Bonk: very cool and extremely useful.
Non-visual Mashups
In a short piece entitled Non-Visual Mashups Rule, Dave Linthicum draws the distinction between visual and non-visual mashups. Visual ones are of course like all of the nearly 900 mashups here, with maps and photos defining the model. Non-visual mashups are more akin to enterprise integration software, invisibly making connections in the background:
Non-visual mashups are the mashing up of two or more services to create a combined application, or integration point, to service a business process. What’s unique here is that they may not externalize anything to a user interface. For instance, mashing up a stream of customer addresses with an address validation service, or mashing up a stream of social security numbers with a credit check service. Each non-visual mashup, perhaps, is sending exceptions off to another stream or queue for processing later, or perhaps to other mashups. This is very simple, and I bet you can think of even more complex and valuable non-visual mashups for your own enterprise…Truth-be-told, while visual mashups are cool and useful, I think that non-visual mashups will be more valuable to business as time goes on.
Reminds me of some of the web services available from StrikeIron. We’ll also start to see more of this via infrastructure-type services like Amazon’s S3 and Simple Queue Service.
