A pinch of this ...

Hi mashers,

I've been pondering what to do next in my 34 Mashups challenge.

A few weeks ago I had to explain to an older family member exactly what a 'mashup' was.  It might not seem like a difficult thing to do, but when their total experience with technology comes down to a bit of email and using the Internet I was wondering how best to explain it to them in simple terms.

At the risk of sounding a little cheesy, the best analogy that I could come up with off the cuff that they would relate to, was to liken it to cooking. I said "I can take some information from here, a bit more from there, and maybe some more from somewhere else, mix it together, bake for a bit, and hey presto, I've got a great dish that tells me something completely new."  It's a bit over-simplified, but they got the concept. John Crupi suggests the same possibilities in his blog, "With Enterprise Mashups, Sometimes 1+1+1=I've Never Seen THAT Before", in making something completely new from separate mashup ingredients.

Anyway, this cooking theme got me thinking that one of the impediments to rapid and creative mashup development is a lack of on-hand basic data; the raw ingredients if you like. At the moment our pantry is looking pretty empty. We've pulled data from various datasources for specific purposes, but haven't explored the opportunity of exposing certain business data in order to make it readily available for consumption in mashups.

This I think will be my next challenge task ... to expose basic business data from several of our core systems so they are available for consumption in mashups ... without having a specific purpose immediately in mind.  I think this would tie back nicely to the Harvest and Enhance pattern categories that Michael Ogrinz defined in "Mashup Patterns - Designs and Examples for the Modern Enterprise".

Time to go and stock up then ...

Happy mashing folks.

Cheers, Innes