Tutorial 1: Creating and Enabling Data Mashups
Full Day

The Web contains thousands of mashups that recombine everything including Google Maps, Flickr, Amazon.com, NASA, the New York Times, and Wikipedia with useful information about travel, finance, real estate, and more. By fusing elements from multiple web sites, mashups are often informative, useful, fun, and even transformative. Mashups also represent the way the Web as a whole is heading.

In this hands-on tutorial, you will learn how to build several basic mashups and how to develop mashups to address various data integration problems of interest to you. You will learn how to create your own mashups; how to exploit such web elements as URLs, tags, and RSS feeds in your mashups; and how to combine APIs and data into mashups. You will also learn how to enable users to recombine content from your digital libraries. Although the most sophisticated mashups demand a wide range of technical knowledge, anyone with a solid knowledge of HTML will be able to learn practical skills from this tutorial.

Learning Objectives:
Participants will obtain a conceptual overview of data mashups, the relationship to the elements that underlie mashups (e.g., syndication feeds, tags, web APIs), and the current range of applications for mashups. Moreover, participants will learn: how to create several basic mashups 1) using tools such as Yahoo! Pipes and 2) using server-side (e.g., PHP or Python) and client-side programming techniques (JavaScript); how to develop the basic architecture for a mashup project of their own; and how to enable mashups of their own content.

Target Audience:
The target audience is anyone who with a basic background with web authoring who is open to diving into hands-on exploration of web APIs, whether they are librarians or computer scientists.

Level of Experience:
The course is geared to be comfortable for an introductory audience.   It will provide advanced challenge exercises to engage technically advanced participants.   

Presenter:
Raymond Yee is a data architect, consultant, and trainer. He is the author of Pro Web 2.0 Mashups: Remixing Data and Web Services (Apress, 2008). He is currently a lecturer at the School of Information, UC Berkeley, where he teaches the course "Mixing and Remixing Information". While earning a Ph.D. in biophysics, he taught computer science, philosophy, and personal development to K-11 students in the Academic Talent Development Program on the Berkeley campus. He is the primary architect of the Scholar's Box, software that enables users to gather digital content from multiple sources to create personal collections that can be shared with others. As a software architect and developer, he focuses on developing software to support learning, teaching, scholarship, and research. Raymond is an erstwhile tubaist, admirer of J. S. Bach, Presbyterian elder, aspiring essayist, son of industrious Chinese-Canadian restaurateurs, and devoted husband of the incomparable Laura.