Basics

As describe in the introduction section, a CommunityMashup instance consists of

• a set of source components 
• a DataSet
• a set of interface components

What source components and interface components to use and how to configure them is described in the mashup configuration. In the following we first describe what source components are available and then briefly address how a mashup configuration looks like - and how such a configuration can be used to instantiate a mashup instance.

CommunityMashup source components

Source components are responsible for the connection to external services. They are reading and writing data and transforming the data between the external and the CommunityMashup data model. All source components are highly configurable for special application purposes.

Public source components

The following sources are available for general use: (information from sociotech.atlassian.net/wiki/)

• CleanUpSource — Intended to be used as gardener in configured data sets. E. g. to remove old items
• FeedSource — Provides access to RSS and Atom feeds.
• FileSource — Can be used to load CommunityMashup data serialized as XML from files.
• GravatarSource — Adds images from gravatar to person depending on their email address.
• Language Detection — This source offers the detection of the language of contents.
• MendeleySource — Provides profiles and publications from mendeley.
• QR Code — Enriches information objects with qr-codes as images containing the links to their web-sites.
• Readability — Enrichment service that adds readable versions of the web site content. As web site objects are always attached to information objects, the created contents will be connected to the information objects.
• Scaled Images — This source service is able to enrich information objects with scaled versions of their images.
• TwitterSource — Provides access to tweets as well as profiles of connected people of a twitter user.
• YammerSource — Source to access data for a yammer network with dedicated support for writing back comments and likes.
• ZemantaSource — Provides tags, categories and pictures for contents based on a semantic content analysis by zemanta.com.

Source components under development

The following sources have been developed for specific use cases (and are not included in the basic CommunityMashup distribution).

Recently updated / used:

• CommunityMashup - Configuration - Load information from ConfTool (person, organization, event(content)) conference management server.
• ExcellInformationSource - Load information (person, organization, content) from Excel tables.
• LDAPSource — Supports the enrichment of profiles with data from an LDAP Directory.
• CommunityMashup - Configuration - Load information (publication(content), person) from MediaTUM digital library server.

Not updated for some time:

• See other entries in the sub directory CommunityMashup - Sources

Configuring a CommunityMashup

In addition to the source components, a CommunityMashup instance consists of interface components and a data store.

Configuring a CommunityMashup instance therefore means

• selecting source components and providing the source components with parameters
• selecting interface components and providing the interface components with parameters

The whole configuration is represented in an XML file. This file can either be changed directly or be changed via the visual mashup web configurator.

See CommunityMashup - Configuration for examples of a full configuration.

Running a CommunityMashup

You can run a CommunityMashup either

• in the Eclipse IDE, or
• in a standalone server environment

Running in the Eclipse IDE

Please first follow the description for setting up an Eclipse installation with all relevant plugins and for downloading the mashups core components as provided in the section "Setting up an development environment" on CommunityMashup - Configuration.

Then create a run configuration as described in section "Testing the sources" on the same page.

In this run configuration you can specify a mashup configuration file (as described in the previous section). If no path is provided, the file is looked for in package "MashupFactoryService/configuration".

Running in a standalone server environment

TBD