UCSF Profiles as a Web Platform for Integration and Collaboration

Eric Meeks, Leslie Yuan, MPH, Anirvan Chatterjee, Mini Kahlon, PhD

Clinical and Translational Science Institute, University of California, San Francisco

Clinical and Translational Science Institute / CTSI Accelerating Research to Improve Health

Introduction Social networking sites such as Facebook,

Google+ and LinkedIn are more than just

web sites - they are web platforms. At UCSF

we recognize the value in making a research

networking site a web platform which can

support applications for collaboration. We

want to integrate our research networking

systems with collaboration tools so that the

same systems our researchers use to

discover experts can also be used to interact

and collaborate with experts.

Methods We integrated UCSF Profiles with

Apache Shindig to add OpenSocial

capabilities into our system, and built

numerous applications based on the

OpenSocial standard. We have made

our work open source and our code

has been adopted by Wake Forest

and Baylor, both of which are

contributing to our OpenSocial

application library. These extensions

will soon be a part of the Profiles

product and we are working with

VIVO to achieve the same ends.

Results As our application library grows, our adoption rate and pool of application developers

expands, resulting in a virtuous cycle . This accelerating growth of available applications

raises the value of adopting OpenSocial within an institution. We are also seeing

increasing sophistication within the applications in our library. The first wave consisted of

small two-tier applications centered around local data. This was followed by a second

wave of multi-tier applications which access external web APIs for data and services. With

our third wave of applications we plan to deliver cross institutional collaboration as a

seamless experience within our local research networking tools!

Discussion Tim O’Reilly coined the term “A

Platform Beats an Application Every

Time.” Social networking sites have

listened and research networking

tools need to listen as well. Modern

research often requires cross-

disciplinary teams which result in

members with disparate locations.

Online tools are an obvious solution

for this challenge. Our research

networking tools currently answer the

discovery component of team

formation. To answer the

collaboration component we should

make our tools platforms that

integrate with existing services. We

need the functionality of LinkedIn,

Google+ and Facebook while

continuing to own the data and online

research experience.

Recognition This project was supported by

NIH/NCRR UCSF-CTSI Grant

Number UL1 RR024131 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.

We would like to thank Andy Bowline

of Wake Forest, Kevin Musgrave of

Baylor, MIT Libraries, the VIVO team,

the OpenSocial Foundation and the

Apache Software Foundation.

2010

Simple Local

Applications

2012 2013

Access to

External Services

Cross-Institutional

Online

Collaboration

Profiles and OpenSocial

HTML, Javascript,

OpenSocial Views

OAuth, SSL,

Security Token

Applications

The Platform

UI Security Data

2011

Participating

Institutions

Standards

and APIs JSON, REST, Activity,

Message, Person* * Researcher RDF

Contribute!

http://www.opengadgets.org

http://www.openfoafal.org

http://github.com/EricMeeks