Introduction to Mashups: 1 + 1 = Mashups?

AIDSportal “HIV Jobs” Mashup

Mashups -- what are they? Are they being used by the HIV/AIDS community? To learn more, we spoke with Rob Worthington from AIDSportal and AIDS.gov advisor, David Galiel .

What is a mashup?

Rob told us, “A mashup is a way of combining data, content, or a function from different websites in a new or innovative way. This can create extra value or utility.”

Many mashups incorporate maps. New York City Coalition Against Hunger created a mashup that uses Google Maps , geographical information, and their own data to help those who have access to the Internet to find help. David said, “The Coalition links data from food providers, soup kitchens, and homeless shelters that allow people to quickly find free meals, farmer’s markets, or soup kitchens.”

Other public health mashups include Who is Sick? , a mashup combining consumer driven (“user-generated”) health information, social networking, and Google maps. Health Care That Works uses Google Maps and data from state and federal government agencies to highlight the impact of hospital closures on low-income communities and communities of color. Healthmap also uses Google Maps and integrates outbreak data from sources such as Google News , ProMED , and the World Health Organization .

Not all mashups involve maps, and many combine multiple information sources and display information in multiple formats. An example of this is HubMed , a mashup that uses information from PubMed’s database to produce a search interface to browse, organize and gather information from the biomedical literature.

How can AIDS Service Organizations use mashups?

Rob told us how AIDS Portal is taking advantage of mashups: “Our first mashup used an RSS feed to display job vacancies from AIDSPortal and Facebook to create an AIDS Job application .” He explained, “As new job vacancies are posted on AIDSPortal, they automatically appear in Facebook.” Read more about this at the AIDS Portal blog .

Global Health Council’s International AIDS Candlelight Memorial Mashup

Another example of an HIV-specific mashup is the International AIDS Candlelight Memorial of the Global Health Council’s mashup of Google Maps with their list of local coordinators.

Rob suggests, “Think about the problems your stakeholders or users face that a mashup could address. For instance, they might want to know where they can access a particular type of AIDS-related service, such as voluntary counseling and testing. A mashup could help you display a list of services on a map, enabling people to see which services are closest to them.”

Getting Started

David told us that “it’s important to note that mashups do require a certain level of comfort with software technology, yet there are several online tools for building mashups that do not require deep technical expertise.” “Plug and play” tools like ZeeMaps and Dapper can help you get started.

The mashup portal ProgrammableWeb.com is a comprehensive resource with introductory tutorials, a directory of mashups, and news. ProgrammableWeb also helps connect mashup coders with organizations that need their services.

“Once you have an idea that you think will help your users,” said Rob, “you need to look at where you can get the data you need. Do you have a database of your own, or is this data already published somewhere on the Web?”

Mashups depend on organizations using open formats and sharing data. They also depend on software developers to develop programs that can talk to each other. So, as you look at ways to use mashups to help your mission, we encourage you to think about ways that you can, in turn, provide mashup content for others to use.

And be sure to come back and post a comment here to let us know what you are doing!

Comments

[Susie Quinn]

Hello! My name is Susie Quinn and I am a grad student at San Jose State University in their MLIS program. I am actually in the process of doing a mashup of maps / google maps and SL for my Maps and GIS class. I want to create a SL display of maps that perhaps show the history of aids, perhaps deaths nationwide or globally. I haven't quite fleshed out my ideas, but wondering if this type of thing has been done in SL. Thanks for any advice.

[The AIDS.gov Team]

Thank you for your comment. We don't know of any HIV/AIDS mashups in Second Life (SL), but we invite you to join us for the SL World AIDS Day events (http://www.karunasl.info/WorldAIDSDaySL) and put your question to the experts.

You may already be familiar with these, but here are some websites that we have come across in our work: John Lester's site - he'll be speaking at the SL World AIDS Day event, too - (http://zero.hastypastry.net/pathfinder/); Healthmap (http://healthmap.org/en); and the new Google Flu Trends (http://www.google.org/flutrends/).

[Franco]

Susie that sounds like a really great idea. I tried looking on the internet for your ideas and i was unable to find something of the sort. If you could produce a simple beta version that would probably take some on lookers!