Mashups and APIs

By The Learning Technology Team21st August 2007Engage

The Learning Technology Team at SIESWE continue their series of articles on how technology can be harnessed in order to imrpove learning and development for the social services workforce…

So, what’s an API? It’s is one of those technical sounding three-letter abbreviations that abound on the internet: API stands for application programming interface, and is defined by Wikipedia as a “source code interface that a computer system or program library provides in order to support requests for services to be made of it by a computer program” — which is a fancy way of saying that APIs provide nice, easy ways for developers to grab data and manipulate it.

APIs exist in almost every field where somebody or something needs to interact with raw data, but here we’ll be looking solely at APIs as they are used online.

Data

Most data on the internet exists in the form of letters and numbers sitting quietly in databases. Until recently that data would have been available only through a single source – the website of its originator. However, many online operations (large and small) choose to make that data available, not only through their own site, but through carefully constructed APIs which allow third-party applications limited access to the data in its raw state.

Examples of such APIs include those from Amazon, Google, Yahoo and Flickr. Some people choose to make use of an API in order to present data in a way which differs from that favoured by its originator: either to aid clarity or emphasise features/information which may otherwise be obscured.

Newsmap

A good example of this is Marcos Weskamp’s Google News-based Newsmap. Marcos was enthused by Google’s News service but,being fluent in Spanish, English and Japanese, quickly became fascinated by the different ways that various countries and cultures reported on the same news stories. He also craved a more visual way of representing news stories and the coverage they were receiving around the world.

Using the raw data from Google News, Marcos was able to reconfigure it into a visual tree-map, where the different categories of news (business, technology, sport, etc.) are represented as different coloured blocks, and the size of each individual block is determined by the amount of coverage that story is receiving in any given country.

He also added the ability to choose from a number of countries, and to combine multiple countries onscreen at the same time. Compare this approach with Google’s more straightforward implementation and it’s clear that Newsmap, while drawing on exactly the same data, provides the user with a wildly different way of interacting with the same source information.

Mapping Applications

Some APIs allow developers access not only to raw data, but to fully functioning miniversions of their own user interface. The most popular examples of this are the mapping applications from both Google and Yahoo. Google Maps, and its Yahoo rival, allow developers to place miniature versions of their applications into their own web pages, and to furnish those maps with information relevant to their own specific needs, such as address info, travel-related data, etc.

Mashups

While repurposing data from a single source lets you do some interesting things, the real power of APIs comes from the ability to combine data from two or more different originators in order to create a hybrid web application. These combinations are known as mashups.

Chicago Crime

For a long time the posterchild of web mashups, Chicago Crime combines crime information from the Chicago Police Department’s Citizen ICAM service with Google Maps and the Chicago Journal newspaper’s crime reports, affording users the opportunity to view details of criminal activity in the city of Chicago geographically, and to filter that data by the nature, date, street, police district or ZIP code of the reported crime.

Mashups In Education

According to the mashup/APItracking website Programmable Web, as of late 2006 some 45% of all mashups consisted of some manner of mapping application, and Google Maps was included in 51% of all mashups listed in their database. It should come as no great shock then to learn that the majority of educational mashups are also based around Google Maps. Currently, nearly all educational mashups in the UK and US are intended for use at primary or secondary school level.

Popular examples include:

– Gmap Pedometer, which has been used to encourage students to plan walks around their neighbourhood, calculate the distances involved, and count the number of calories likely to be expended in the course of the exercise
– The Teacher’s Corner Pen Pal Finder, which lets children find pen pals from a database by a combination of school year and location
– Google Planimeter, which calculates area based on the triangulation of points selected by the user, and can be used both for simple geographical study and in combination with detailed demographic data for further study.

While the use of mashups in further and higher education is currently less prevalent than in school-level teaching, the utilisation of these new tools by those in primary and secondary school education highlights the potential for pedagogical uses of mashups at tertiary level and in workbased professional learning.

For information on any aspect of learning technology for the social services workforce please contact: [email protected]

Related Internet Links

Chicago Crime
www.chicagocrime.org/

Chicago PD Citizen ICAM
tinyurl.com/yfd75b

Educause Learning Initiative (2005), 7 Things You Should Know About Mapping Mashups
tinyurl.com/25yxfp

Flickr
flickr.com/

Gmaps Pedometer
www.gmap-pedometer.com/

Google Maps
maps.google.co.uk/

Google News
news.google.co.uk/

Google Planimeter
www.acme.com/planimeter/

Newsmap
tinyurl.com/2l6co

Programmable Web
www.programmableweb.com/