Mash Me Up

Using Wikipedia toSmarten up Smart SearchNicholas WyantJuly 30, 2009

Mash Up Wikipedia

• Academic Library websites can be boring and difficult to use

• Federated Searching has improved things

• Mash ups will rock our world

Audience

Students

• Students are overwhelmed with the amount of information provided to them

• Providing more information to enable better research

If this is so great…..

• Why aren’t we already doing it?

OpenAPI

• Not all APIs are available

• Amazon, Google Maps, Flickr, etc…all want you to have their API

• Wikipedia does not share that sentiment

How do we make this dream a reality?

• Wikipedia’s API

• Javascript to duplicate the search

• Primo is already geared to do federated searching

So far

• There is a reverse engineered API of wikipedia• Unfortunately it is not reliable• Many universities already employ similar

tactics

What’s Next

• Testing the implementation of Javascript with Smart Search on an existing Open API

• Flickr?