Open Research Network Gadgets

1. Open Research Networking Gadgets (ORNG)
Research Networking through Social Technologies
Eric Meeks, Brian Turner, Anirvan Chatterjee, Leslie Yuan
Clinical and Translational Science Institute, University of California, San Francisco
Clinical and Translational Science Institute / CTSI
Accelerating Research to Improve Health
This project was supported by NIH/NCRR UCSF-CTSI Grant Number UL1 TR000004
and Harvard Catalyst Grant Number 1 UL1 RR025758-01. Its contents are solely the
responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH.
Join ORNG!
http://orng.info
Introduction
Open Research Networking Gadgets, or ORNG, refers to a
technology standard supported by both the VIVO and Harvard
Catalyst Profiles RNS research networking tools. With ORNG,
institutions can develop and install independent applications to
add features to their research networking tool without having to
alter the source code of the tool itself. Being standards-based,
these applications can run in either the VIVO or Profiles
system. The ORNG standard was developed by UCSF by
combining the industry-created OpenSocial application
standard with the VIVO-supported Linked Open Data standard.
In development, this required integrating the research
networking platform (VIVO and Profiles) into the Apache
Shindig OpenSocial engine, and extending OpenSocial to
support Linked Data through JSON and later JSON-LD. The
ORNG applications themselves are built in Javascript and
HTML, and the ORNG framework provides functionality ranging
from data persistence, to serializing semantic data into JSON,
to authenticated access into external web services. As a full
application standard, numerous features can be built with
ORNG, but in practice we have found that the greatest value
comes in using ORNG to integrate with other web sites and
services.
Gadget Hosting Servers
http://anywhere/gadget.xml
ShindigORNG
Tomcat
Profiles or
VIVO
Profile HTML
RDF/XML
gadget.xml
The ORNG applications run as iframes within the browser. Note
that the ORNG content will be seen by the browser as coming
from http://[RNT URL]/shindigorng, this allows the Javascript in
the ORNG gadgets to avoid security issues with cross site
scripting.
The RDF/XML is consumed by ShindigORNG and converted to
JSON-LD*, where it is then piped through to the browser as a
component of the ORNG content. The ORNG Gadgets are
written in HTML and Javascript, hence the need for JSON based
data. Note that RDF/XML from other servers can also be
accessed by ShindigORNG and converted to JSON-LD.
Web services used by ORNG applications will all be proxied
through ShindigORNG (and IIS when needed) and can optionally
use OAuth if some level of security is required (as with KNODE).
Internal or External
Web Service
(SlideShare, YouTube,
Wake Forest Grant
Search, KNODE,
Chatter Proxy, etc.)
WebContent
[OAuth]
Researcher Content from
Social Media
ORNG applications allow us to make our researcher profiles
more complete by bringing in external researcher content in
“real time” that isn’t captured by our current research
networking tools. This includes multimedia data that is best
handled by sites that are specifically designed for managing
certain types of content (YouTube for videos, SlideShare for
presentations), as well as rapidly changing data that demands
real-time integration to have value (Twitter for tweets). It is
important to note that in these cases, the content itself is not
easy to harvest in RDF form because it’s either non-textual or
needed immediately. However, metadata about the content
could (and should) find a place in the ontologies used by our
research networking tools. We are in early discussions with
both the VIVO and Profiles teams to make this possible.
Research Collaboration
Support for online collaboration, be it for work or for play, is an
expected component of social networking. With ORNG, we are
bringing online collaborative capabilities into our research
networking tools. At UCSF we have integrated Salesforce Chatter
enterprise social networking into our research networking platform
via ORNG. This integration allows researchers to “follow” one
another from within Profiles, as well as to create Chatter Groups
for performing online collaboration. Adding these capabilities into
our researcher tools through real time integration to a 3rd party
service is important for a number of reasons:
• We don’t want to rebuild complex groupware functionality that
has already been built, nor do we want to depend entirely on an
external service that would require us to export our data into a
3rd party system that cannot house the richness of our
information.
• Online collaborations that are generated from our research
networking tools will have a complete data trail, allowing us to
better measure the impact of our tools.
• Many of our research networking tools are locally installed, as
this gains the benefit of provenance. But we do not want our
collaborations to be limited to our local institutions.
With ORNG, we can integrate our local research networking tools
with shared services such as Chatter, Jive, or Dropbox. This will
allow us to facilitate inter-institutional online collaborations, a
recognized critical need for advancing medical research.
Architecture and Methods
360°View of a Researcher
Web Server
IIS or Tomcat
ORNG Content (HTML, Javascript, JSON/JSON-LD*)
IIS Proxy
* JSON-LD in Profiles 2.0,
varying JSON in other systems