Mashups are all about presenting information from various sources in an integrated Web application. While early experiments with multimedia-multiweb application integration were done by savvy programmers who would effectively decode as-yet-unpublished APIs for applications such as Google Maps, currently there is a wide range of software platforms for the development of mashups, and building a mashup is becoming increasingly easy. In this hands-on tutorial, experts from Google and Yahoo! will introduce their mashup development technologies; participants will then build mashups on the spot. Emphasis will be given to mashups related to HCSNet's Priority Areas.
Audience
The goal of the workshop is to introduce mashup technology to all those interested in using it for topics related with any of HCSNet's Priority Areas. We welcome people from academia and industry with interest in any of these areas:
- Speech
- Effective Interfaces
- Next-Generation Search Technology
- Human Communication Disorders
- Perception and Action
This workshop is especially suited for students, researchers and developers who want to apply this new technology in their projects.
Event Format
The workshop will run over two days. The central component of the workshop will take place in PC labs with all the software required to build mashups, and with technical assistance. There will be extensive presentations by experts in mashups, and the event will conclude with presentations of the mashups built over the two days.
There will be presentations by the following people:
Neil Wilkinson, Technical Director at Yahoo! 7
An intro to Yahoo!'s Open Strategy - focus on YQL (Yahoo! Query Language)
YQL is Yahoo's SQL-like language that provides straightforward ways to mash up different APIs into one data source for use in applications. The presentation will outline how YQL allows developers to mash HTML pages, publicly available feeds, Yahoo APIs, external APIs and their own data tables into a single query to make the most of almost anything you find on the internet: select * from internets.
Neil Wilkinson is the Technical Director of Yahoo!7 and Yahoo!Xtra responsible for a multi-functional team across User Experience, Front-end Engineering, Software Engineering, Project Management, and Datacentre Operations.
Neil began his career working as a software engineer for Demon Internet in the UK in 1998 where he worked on a variety of mobile and web applications.
From 2000 through 2003 Neil worked with several internet start-up companies, developing mobile applications and e-marketing websites, emigrating to Sydney, Australia at the end of 2003.
In mid 2003, he began his Yahoo! career, and has spent a large chunk of that time managing a team of people developing the media sites that make local content accessible to Yahoo!7 users. During February 2006, Neil was part of the team that launched the Yahoo!7 experience to Australia and in March 2007, he was responsible for the technical delivery of the Yahoo!Xtra content sites for New Zealand.
Pamela Fox, Developer Programs Engineer for the Google Maps API
Creating Maps Mashups: From Data to Map
This talk will discuss the basics of creating maps mashups, including an introduction to the Google Maps API and an overview of the different ways of bringing in data to display on the map. It will also briefly mention a few advanced topics, like custom maps and clustering.
Pamela is the Developer Programs Engineer for the Google Maps API. For the last two years, she's enjoyed helping developers innovate with the JavaScript, Flash, and Static Maps APIs and combine them with many of Google's other amazing APIs like App Engine, Google Web Toolkit, Google Spreadsheets API, and more.
Before that, Pamela graduated with her CS masters from USC, where she helped grow the video games department and dabbled in the 3d animation and linguistics departments.
James Hogan, from Queensland University of Technology
Making Mashups for Data Intensive Research
Modern research is increasingly founded on web accessible data and services.on a scale almost unimaginable a generation ago. In some areas, the principal change has come from the exposure of long-established collections to a broader audience. In others, notably in genomics, and in the analysis of text and multimedia artefacts, there has been a fundamental change in the economics of data creation, and a consequent explosion in the amount of data available. Some of this data is carefully structured and readily characterised, having benefited from the work of dedicated curators. More commonly, the data is less structured, with limited descriptive metadata and serious questions over its consistency, and ultimately its usability. Even when the data and relevant computational services are well-managed, the primary interface is usually an interactive web page, and there remains considerable inconvenience for researchers in organising the necessary workflows across these disparate sites.
Data intensive research thus requires broad exploration of data and services, filtering of irrelevant and unusable material, construction of complex ad hoc workflows to perform computational experitment and (ideally) the aggregation of related data sources and their processed outputs to provide more extensive collections for other researchers. Each of these requirements is in itself a Grand Challenge for the research community, but some very significant progress can be made through lightweight integration of data sources and and services via the web mashups approach. This is especially true given the emergence of hosted mashup frameworks from major vendors, which allow non-programmers to generate applications of considerable sophistication. In this talk, I shall examine the data and workflow challenges presented facing modern research and how they may be addressed through mashups, illustrating these ideas through our work on BioMashups within the Microsoft QUT eResearch Centre (using both javascript and the Microsoft Popfly environment; see http://www.mquter.qut.edu.au/bio) and other work on localisation (ad hoc mashups using javascript and python; services under the Google AppEngine environment.)
Important Dates
Submission Deadline: Monday 22nd June 2009
Notification of Award: Monday 29th June 2009
Registration: Closes Monday 20th July 2009
Event Date: Monday 27th to Tuesday 28th July 2009
Registration Information
Undergraduate and postgraduate students from Macquarie University can attend the workshop using a separate registration process detailed here.
All other attendees can use the regular HCSNet event registration form (linked below).Registration is free for Macquarie University undergraduate students. HCSNet members who have joined 2 months prior to registration are also free. Non HCSNet members will need to pay $50 per day to register.
Registration: Closes Monday 20th July 2009
Getting There
Macquarie University has several public transport options available. A new train station (Macquarie University) has opened and timetable and maps can be found on the City Rail website: http://www.cityrail.info/
The Sydney Buses network has a lot of services that stop at the university. You can find more information at: http://www.timetables.mq.edu.au/
Parking on campus is very limited, casual rates are $18 per day. More information about parking can be found on this website: http://www.ofm.mq.edu.au/parking_fees.htm
