At the recent Mashup Camp in Dublin, Ireland
Dennis Deery at Irish Rose Consulting (https://irose.com) won IBM’s Business Mashup Challenge
as well at 2n price in the Best Mashup competition. By leveraging Web 2.0 mashup tools from Kapow
Technologies, IBM and StrikeIron, the Dublin, Ireland IT consulting firm created “Farm
Explorer,” a mashup that actively harvests the Web and company databases to provide
a single screen of data feeds that help farm workers do their jobs.
“With a large farming operation, it has been
traditionally difficult for all the people involved with crop production to
remain informed about the current field conditions and its activity history,”
said Dennis Deery, founder of Irish Rose Consulting. “As with any industry, enterprise mashups help
workers achieve higher levels of productivity through better and more timely
information”. Furthermore Dennis says that “I was pleased to learn about Kapow as I feel
there's great potential out there for using an incredible amount of data
currently presented on web sites for producing some interesting mashups”.
Using IBM’s QEDWiki and StrikeIron’s services, and linking internal and external
data sources together with Openkapow, Farm Explorer displays information from
the farm's local databases, including field numbers, crop and grower information, and pesticide application
history. Among its many novel features, the mashup also provides:
- A Google map component of the field’s location
- Links to PDF files of chemical label and Material Safety Data
Sheet information provided by chemical companies to assist field workers
in safely dealing with pesticides
- Recent photos of the selected field are displayed via a Flickr
query
- An Accuweather widget, provinding current weather and a 5-day
forecast for the field location
- A widget that displays local sales and use tax information for the
field locale
- An Openkapow widget that scrapes gas price information from the MSN web site, linked to
gas station locations near the field (Try or download the Lowest Gas
Prices robot here)
- A widget that displays local sales and use tax information for the
field locale
So what happens to this Mashup after Mashup
Camp? “After a little tweaking, I plan to demonstrate this mashup to one or
more existing clients with the hope that they'll be interested in further developing
the mashup into a usable system based on their data sources.” says Dennis
Deery. So not only did he win the IBM Business Mashup Challenge
using openkapow, he also has a good chance of really making the Mashup into a
real business project.