I attended ThatCamp London in June that incorporated a Developers Challenge. So I (with a little help from Boris Capitanu) decided to participate and leverage existing SEASR/Meandre flows that we have created in order to demonstrate how they could be used to create a mashup. I chose to use the Victoria and Albert Museum Collections data because they created an API to access their data. I created two new components. One to process and query the API iteratively until all results are retrieved. The second one is more generic for selecting specific json fields from the data.

I modified 4 existing web service enabled flows to use these components to retrieve the data and create the visualizations. Once I had the 4 flows functioning separately, I created an html page that passes the search query to each flow and create the visualizations for the mashup. The first view is a tagcloud of the description of the objects that satisfy the query. The second view is a ngram tagcloud of the historical significance attribute of the objects. The third applies entity extraction to the data, extracting the location and plotting these locations on a map, where the sentences containing the locations can be read. The fourth one also applies entity extraction and extracts people, organizations and locations and creates links between entities that coexist within 2 sentences. This was just a quick prototype to showcase the capabilities of the Meandre environment for a mashup. So ultimately these flows could be optimized for performance.

I put together a screencast in a short time frame to satisfy the Challenge deadline. So the video is not polished because there was no time for editing or tweaking the search term. Thus, here is the video in its raw form. The good news was that I received an Honorable Mention for the submission, “… with a neat SEASR flow that used the API from the Victoria and Albert Museum and visualized searches in multiple ways.” The winner announcement for the Developer Challenge is here.

We created a movie that highlights some of the projects and groups using the SEASR technology. Check out http://repository.seasr.org/Movies/SEASR-Nov-2009.m4v for more details. We will plan to update this movie periodically. If you are using SEASR, please let us know, so that we can incorporate your work.

Last night, I created a movie that walks through the process of installing the SEASR/Meandre tools and shows how to run the tools. You can check out the movie at http://repository.seasr.org/Movies/SEASR_Install_and_Run.m4v. If you listen closely you might even hear my puppy squeak a toy.

A screencast showing the Firefox plugin for SEASR Analytics for Zotero is available: http://repository.seasr.org/Movies/ZoteroToSEASRanalytics.mov.