Mashups in Action: Fusing Enterprise Mashups to Enterprise Widgets (The Rest of the Story)
About this time last month I wrote a 'Mashups in Action' post that described a then-nameless organization's use of mashups and mashlets (mashup-driven widgets) to expand the reach of their collaborative professional community outside the walls of the community proper. But I was admittedly circumspect on the name of the organization. Which isn't the most confidence-building thing considering that this was, according to me, a public use of mashups/mashlets. I am ready to rectify that. To steal that famous tagline from long-time radio broadcaster Paul Harvey...and now, the rest of the story.
With over $12.4 billion in annual revenues, Thomson Reuters is one of the world’s largest information brokers. In 2007 approximately 88% of it’s pro forma revenues were derived from electronic products, software and services . Thomson applied mashups to one of it’s scientific community portals, ResearcherID, a ‘gateway to researchers and their published works’ for ‘accurate author and publication identification’. ResearcherID provides first-person author profiles, publication lists, and citation metrics, creating an source for research professionals to share and collaborate.
The mashups in this case are dynamic, user-specific views of the user (who are typically researchers in fields like physics or medicine), their published research, and demographic views of third-party citations of that research. Thomson also added dynamic mashlets for these mashups that were designed to be easily be embedded in a user's personal blog/website or emailed to peers. Each widget, when embedded in a personal blog or portal, gives a small dynamic preview of the data from the community. It is not static but rendered when you ask for it.
In just a few weeks, these mashlets (Thomson calls them 'Badges') are already in hundreds of individual blogs/wikis/websites around the world. But explaining it pales in comparison to seeing it in action. By now you've probably noticed a smallish 'Researcher ID Profile' graphic in this blog. It is the Badge of Teng Li, Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Maryland. Hover over the Badge and you get the snapshot of Teng Li's most recent work; clicking on the 'Go to...' text at the bottom of the Badge takes you directly to Teng Li's page within the ResearcherID community with his complete professional publication vitae.
To see an example of a Badge in action, go to Teng Li's website at the University of Maryland, look under his picture (you might have to scroll down a tiny bit), and you'll see his Researcher ID badge. Like the hundreds of other researchers who have posted Badges on their blogs/wikis/websites in the last few weeks, Teng Li did not get technical support from Thomson to get this done. He did it himself which is more impressive if you remember that he's a mechanical engineer, not a web developer. He merely went to the Researcher ID Badge Creation Page, chose his Badge type (most of them seem to prefer the big version), clicked the 'Generate Badge Code' button, and pasted it into his website.
Finally, it's interesting to note that Thomson didn't stop at the Badge, but provided 2 other mashup-fueled options for the members of ResearcherID: the Collaboration Network, to see who Teng has professionally collaborated with, and the Citing Articles Network, to see who has cited Teng Li's work.
I said this in my previous post but it bears repeating: By all accounts, mashups/mashlets were a very successful addition to Thomson's ResearcherID community. Without any promotion/advertising (or tech support) to its community, there were hundreds of independent professional blogs/websites around the world with ResearcherID Badges in them, all linking back to the ResearcherID community. As our friend Andy Mulholland, Global CTO at CapGemini, put it in his most recent blog, 'It’s another part of the extreme flexibility associated with the new approach to technology that Web 2.0 brings.'
