I School lecturer Raymond Yee recently authored the new book Pro Web 2.0 Mashups: Remixing Data and Web Services, a subject he also teaches at the I School.
A mashup, in the words of Wikipedia, is a web site or web application "that seamlessly combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience." Yee describes the book as "a practical how-to on using Web 2.0 technologies to remix/reuse data, web services, and micro-applications to create hybrid applications. In other words, it aims to teach programmers and avid non-programmers how to create mashups."
"The book serves as a guide to see things that you might not have seen before," Yee adds
At the I School, Yee has been teaching the course "Mixing and Remixing Information" for the past three years. Although the new book mirrors much of the course content, Yee says he does not intend to use it as a textbook for the course: "I don't use the book like a Physics text, to go through chapter by chapter. I don't assign problem sets." Instead, the course is project based, and the student learn through hands-on, real-world experience.
In the course, students develop new web interfaces that pull together data from multiple sources to solve specific problems in new ways. One student course project was a dinner-and-a-movie finder, an idea that Yee describes as "a classic mashup pattern" in the way it pulls two sources of information together.
Another student project tells you whether to carry an umbrella today, based on data from the National Weather Service (with daily forecasts) and your Google Calendar (which knows where you'll be today).
Yee notes that some sources of data are easier to find than others. In the dinner-and-a-movie project, Yee was surprised by how difficult it is to get movie showtimes in machine readable format, due to the proprietary interests of data providers. Working through real projects helps the students wrestle with both theory and real-world practicalities of creating mashups.
For more information, see Raymond Yee's blog about the book, his blog about IT and data analysis, or details about the book.