I have been closely following the excellent work by myExperiment team. They recently presented at my team’s All-Hands Meeting here in Redmond. It was nice to see David De Roure (co-principal investigator) and Jiten Bhagat (main developer) again. Microsoft is, of course, proudly co-funding the effort.

A Web API exposing all the data was one of the things I was keen to see from the myExperiment team. This does not only promote integration but also helps demonstrate the value of “software + services”. I used the myExperiment Web API, WPF, and a library that we are developing to visual “data networks” to create this very simple example… (apologies for the quality but that’s the best that YouTube can do I think).

The nodes in the graph that don’t have photographs are the previews of the workflows associated with each user. One can imagine all sorts of different types there in addition to different types of connections/edges.

We are already working on a similar prototype for the “research output” repository platform, which we are going to demonstrate at the Open Repositories 2008 conference. It implements lots of the “data networking” ideas.

Oh… and when the WPF graph component is finished, its source code will be available. Christof Sprenger of DPE is doing an excellent job at driving the execution on this.