OpenSocial Powers Scientific Research Communities
August 20th, 2012 | Published in Google OpenSocial
Palo Alto, CA -- The OpenSocial Foundation today announced that the biomedical research networking community (think "distributed LinkedIn for cancer researchers") with the help of the OpenSocial Research Networking Gadgets (ORNG) initiative, and two major open source research networking platforms are adopting OpenSocial.
“The vision of making our research networking systems OpenSocial platforms so that independent applications can be built and shared amongst institutions is now coming to fruition at the required scale,” said EricMeeks, a founder of ORNG and lead technical architect for the Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). “This will allow us to expand our research systems from researcher discovery to researcher collaboration, and perhaps most importantly cross-institutional research collaboration, without forcing us to rebuild the online collaboration tools that are currently found in commercial networking systems.”
“The vision of making our research networking systems OpenSocial platforms so that independent applications can be built and shared amongst institutions is now coming to fruition at the required scale,” said EricMeeks, a founder of ORNG and lead technical architect for the Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). “This will allow us to expand our research systems from researcher discovery to researcher collaboration, and perhaps most importantly cross-institutional research collaboration, without forcing us to rebuild the online collaboration tools that are currently found in commercial networking systems.”
Earlier in July, the VIVOplatform for scientific collaboration and discovery, formally announced support for OpenSocial in version 1.5. VIVO has a number of major partner institutions, including the University of Florida, Cornell University, the University of Indiana, and Scripps, among many others.
"The VIVO team is working to encourage independent development on the VIVO platform, and support for the ORNG initiative is a significant step in that direction. We are eager to see how the research networking community responds to this initiative, which joins the flexibility of the OpenSocial standard with the expressive power of semantic data,” said Jim Blake, VIVO technology lead at Cornell. “The upcoming VIVO Conference will provide a focus for discussion and exchange of ideas, with both a workshop and a panel discussion dedicated to OpenSocial and ORNG."
After several years of support as an unofficial add-on, the Profiles Research Networking Software platform will be bundling OpenSocial into the core product. Profiles was developed for Harvard Catalyst: The Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center under the supervision of Griffin M. Weber, MD, PhD, chief technology officer at Harvard Medical School.
“By enabling different research networking platforms to share a common approach to implementing front-end tools, OpenSocial has benefits for multiple stakeholders,” Weber said. “Software developers can use the same code to add new functionality to multiple products; institutions can more easily make decisions about which platform to adopt; and researchers who are part of cross-institutional teams will have a similar user experience when collaborating online.”
UCSF’s Meeks pioneered the integration of OpenSocial and Apache Shindig into these platforms. He's now working to develop an app directory (as with Apache Rave), and is working with the OpenSocial Foundation to engage a community of developers. OpenSocial app development in research networking will be a major topic covered at the annual VIVO conference in August.
“This is an excellent example of how an open, community driven specification enables a broad and vibrant ecosystem. It’s exciting to see how and entire industry segment is working together to move the social Web forward,” Meeks said.
To learn more about OpenSocial, visit www.OpenSocial.org.
“This is an excellent example of how an open, community driven specification enables a broad and vibrant ecosystem. It’s exciting to see how and entire industry segment is working together to move the social Web forward,” Meeks said.
To learn more about OpenSocial, visit www.OpenSocial.org.
Information about VIVO is available at http://vivoweb.org/
The VIVO conference Web site is http://vivoweb.org/conference
Information about Harvard Profiles is available at http://profiles.catalyst.harvard.edu/.
Posted by Mark Weitzel, President, OpenSocial Foundation