Mashup of Tools through Interoperability Standards RSS, RDF, KML and XSL

Considerable effort is being devoted to the development, and testing of interoperability standards for data access, such as the OGC Web Services WMS/WCS/WFS. The federated data system, DataFed, developed as a broad partnership utilizes these data access standards to deliver a rich array of quantitative air quality and geospatial data to any client application. Recent advances in standardization also allow the linking of distributed applications through the exchange of additional data types: (1)The Really Simple Syndication (RSS) standard facilitates the exchange of simple text records (e.g. annotated bookmarks); (2) The Resource Description Framework (RDF) standard allows the formal description of semantically rich data structures; (3) The Google Keyhole Markup Language (KML) is the standard way to encode/render geospatial data and metadata; (4) The EMBED standard facilitates the incorporation of web content from one server into the web page hosted on another server. Use of these standards now permits the easy creation of user-defined application "mashups" that transform/integrate various data/metadata streams. Wikis, originally used to collaboratively write documents, are now also used as a host for integrating mashups of this type. In this paper, we will illustrate these application mashups. We will show an example where the wiki host receives RSS feeds from Del.icio.us, blogs, etc. A semantically enhanced wiki is used to create and manage structured metadata, which then can be shared through the RDF standard feed. Content from Google Maps, videos from YouTube, PPT slides from SlideShare are also integrated into wiki pages through the EMBED standard. Mashups between the DataFed data access system, the wiki and GoogleEarth using KML, XSL and RDF will also be demonstrated.