Too many information sources? Mash them up

Posted for Haidar AM

I came across this article  which talks about automating mashups in enterprise portals.

Enterprise portals were meant to be single point of access to information, but most companies today have several portals and some users are interested in internal as well as external information and it is time consuming process to check all these information sources.
So what is the solution?

Web 2.0 came up with a technology called Mashups. What they basically do is aggregating information from different sources into a single user portal through APIs. Tthere are several tools to manually create these mashups but the problem with these tools is that they require some technical experience or programming skills. The authors of the article are building a framework to make this process automatic and so it doesn't need any programing or technical skills. The framework automatically generate personalized mashups based on the knowledge about the user and the context in which he is acting in. I can simplify it with this analogy "Automating mashups combine the buy/search history from Amazon and Google Ads on Gmail based on the e-mail you are reading".
They have embedded a prototype implementation in IBM's WebSphere Portal.
This interesting story case was mentioned in the article

        "Consider the case of a finance manager reading a news bulletin about rumors of a planned merger with another
          company and its consequences for the stock market. In this example, the framework can display a side menu
          that shows the situation on the stock market, including stock quotes of the companies mentioned in the text.
          Another side menu can display an executive summary of the technology mentioned in the text and a list of people
          in the manager’s department who are familiar with it."

How important is this feature? How could it help the enterprise users? Do you think this feature as a mandatory in next generation Enterprise Portals?

Comments

[KTW]

I think that mashups could potential afford many more advantages and benefits to different businesses if they have more than one portal. I think that it could potentially encourage information sharing and transparency and promote participation and sharing, adding a social facet. Mashups could foster better identification and further segmentation of user populations if used properly. I have been reading a lot about this topic and I think that it could be better for business usage, especially if you have portals for different usage like ERP or document management. I would not want it as a personal option.

[Kyle Fishwick]

If you know what you are doing, mashups are a very cool way to get similar topical information. The example above with the news article and the stock market is just one example. Intuitive search engines that look for patterns lead to AI and that is where the future is heading. This is a necessary stepping stone and if you use them well, can give you large ammounts of information on 1 topic.
The problem with these is almost always useability, they are great if you don't need tech support to setup and use.

[Veerapatr.k]

I have never heard of mashups before. After I did a reserch about it. The three key technology themes and the corresponding technologies for enterprises to examine closely within them are Web 2.0, Real World Web, and Applications Architecture.
It sounds interesting. I think it is not important to me, but it is good to have it. I am personally interested in something new that I don't know, and is a useful tool to stay up on different news.

[Keith Townsend]

Awww. The return of the executive dashboard. I've found that they have limited application. It's good for a executive dashboard type implementation but this only normally serve a few users and the cost is normally not justified.

When the original sponsor leaves then the application and the associated work is lost.

[Kevin M.]

I have never heard of the mashups before or have used it. I think this can be a great tool for collaboration but the security can be an issue. Also, as the OP mentioned above, technical skills are required to actually setup and use those mashups. If someone can comeup with a way to make those less technical and easy to setup. I can see how this can be useful to have all the information available to you at one point specially if you are in the management position requiring you to make a strategic decisions based on data presented. It may become wave of the future and it definitely has great use for it.

[Tarngrud Tripitak]

I also have not heard about it before, but I think automatic mashup feature is an important building block in helping users navigate the tremendous amount of information available on the Web and in corporate intranets. It provides an easy way to access background information and to discover unknown but relevant content. However, it is still concerned about privacy of the content issue coming from different portals.

[Lauren J.]

I have to agree with a few earlier posts that the option of a mash up portal can be intrusive. I also think that tracking digital footprints to assess user preferences becomes stale at some point as tastes change. As long as the portal is refreshed regularly it might be ok but I wouldn't be interested for personal or professional use. The idea of someone or something storing my preferences across portals is too much "help" I can manage on my own information just fine.

[James Kempski]

This would be an incredible important feature if you were able to fully integrate the multiple enterprise portals that companies operate off of but I don't think that with Mashup it will have all the same capabilities as each portal.

At my company, we have multiple portals for a variety of reasons but the primary is security. Being an IT company we have looked at many different internal software but must past strick security measures. This could be a great tool if the applications can be replicated identically to the needs to each company and has high levels of security.

[Munib R]

Mashup's is not a great idea, privacy of the content is a major issue for me, though the idea looks some what innovative, but combining different portals together, sometimes become a hassle rather then convenience.

[Jeff Newton]

I agree that mashups are a good way to combine information so that there is one location from which to obtain it. Provided the technology doing the "mashing" is sound there can be a lot of benefits.

[Roselyn Odulate]

No No No..... Putting information together is one of the biggest mistake any company can every make. what happens if any disaster occurs. How can information be recovered. That alone should let any organization not want to integrate information. That could lead to a company crash in the long run.

[Kaushik Patel]

Never heard of mashups before but it sounds interesting. I don't think its really important in the feature but it would be something useful. I don't like the idea where you need lot of programing background to configure it but it looks like there might be framework so make it easier. The idea of getting information together is always a good thing since it simplifies lot of overlaps.
I have never used anything like this but it seems like RSS feed type of feature.

[Grzegorz Walukanis]

I dont think it is important, at least not to me. I usually know what information I am looking for and the one and only place I look for information is Google.com. I love simplicity and speed, not thousands of useless informations.

I wonder how does it determine the "user" content. Does it store previous options selected by the user? It sounds to me like somebody is spying on me.

[Kate Gory]

Given the level of information overload, I think this is an important feature. It is especially important since it is customized based upon user preference and use. Our firm is currently working on updating our intranet portal to aggregate the information using different APIs and RSS feeds. The mashup feature would be especially nice if managers could set different settings for their employees' mashups to affect the content they receive and also to set up a hierarchy by which people could receive certain feeds based upon what their associates or subordinates preferences, postings, etc.

I think too many intranet portals are used solely as a method by which companies can push information they deem important. Anything that creates a more user friendly, collaborative approach is an improvement to me.

[Lana Henderson]

This topic reminds me of My Yahoo [portal technology]. Using API's, I can select which content I want to populate my portal. And Amazon and Google. Of course Yahoo isn't automatic which I think is a good and a bad thing since it takes effort to get my space organized. Google and Amazon certainly use the mashup concept to target information - ads in Google's case and recommendations in Amazon's. I don't mind either since it is either based on the content you are reading at the time or a purchase previously made - both innocuous in my opinion. It could get creepy when information is provided for you based on tracking your movements; which I agree with Sally is a bit invasive.

[Matt Fields]

I think the automated mashup concepts is somewhat already in place by Google. Google has a free product called Reader that allows you to search for RSS feeds based on keyworks and have all the feeds related to those keywords in one place. I personally use this everyday, and is a great tool to stay up on different news.

[Joe Steinkamp]

I think it's extremely important to have mashups. Web users are finding information from more and more sources, which can make it feel like such a daunting tasks to get all of it. Many jobs require being informed as best as possible and there's no better way then to login to one resource and everything you need is right there.

[zainab]

I have not heard about it but I make some research after I read an article talk about it and the challenges that mash up faces

A good thing that mash up is using newer, loosely "Web 2.0" techniques and in my opinion better that portals …
There are many types of mashups, such as consumer mashups, data mashups, and enterprise mashupsbut the most common type of mashup is the consumer mashup.
Also, there are challenges Like ,integrity problems with the end-user, some data that is available on the Web cannot be reused tobecause the data is capsulated with thepresentation layer. Security and identity for example ,when end-user connect dynamically to Web sites and notunder the provider’s control that may be cause problems. Easy to use, it should be efficient mashup search functionalities and lightweight enable even for non-programmers asmooth mashup reuse.
what do you think about these challanges and how should we solve them?

[Janice Hill]

I had heard of ‘mashups’ prior to reading this blog post. However, I had not heard the part about automatically generating mashups based on the user. Sally, thanks for the explanation of what makes a mashup different from a portal; I had always considered portals and mashups to be somewhat the same.
I’m not sure I want my content aggregated based on my personal information. When I use Amazon, the site often suggests items I may like based on things I had previously purchased or viewed on Amazon and I’m not always pleased with the suggestions. I did find a way to have Amazon disregard certain previously purchased items when making these suggestions.

[Sally Loies]

Not having heard about ‘mashups’ before, I did a little research to educate myself on what it is. Wikipedia offered an insight into this technology and basically compared mashups to portals. Both mashups and portals are content aggregation technologies. ‘Portals are an older technology designed as an extension to traditional dynamic Web applications’ whereas mashups are ‘Using newer, loosely defined "Web 2.0" techniques’. According to Wikepedia ‘The portal model has been around longer and has had greater investment and product research. Portal technology is therefore more standardized and mature. Over time, increasing maturity and standardization of mashup technology may make it more popular than portal technology.’ Wikipedia has a link to a data mashup Chicago Crime Map, which indicates the crime rate and location of crime in Chicago which I found very informative and interesting.

The article takes mashups a step further with the idea that the framework will automatically generate personalized mashups based on the knowledge about the user and the context in which he is acting in not only interesting, but seems a little futuristic and may seem to some somewhat invasive.