Mashup In Public Libraries Open Government Information Applied Research

Government information disclosure has great significance on preventing corruption, protecting the citizens'rights and promoting economic development. The Decree of Government Information Disclosure, which was implemented on May 1,2008, established the place of public libraries as a important government information disclosure service department officially. To be a information organization, storage and non-profit-making service department, the function of public libraries can not be taken place by other information service agencies. At present, government information disclosure service provided by public libraries in China is still on a low level, can not meet the needs of the public in the new network environment. Improving the service of government information disclosure in public libraries through adopting new technologies have been new research topics.Mashup, as a new breed of internet application born in new web2.0 environment, which can merge two or more resource or web service together to build a new application that can provide a new service none of the old services or resources can do. Mashup applications have a bright prospect for its low threshold and rapid process of development. Mashup applied to public libraries has a profound impact on government information sharing and enhancing social democracy, ect. Besides this, libraries can ensure the fairness of accesses to information, rehabilitate the position of public libraries as information center of communities, and realize the social values of public libraries as a information service department.Then, the paper develops sample applications from the standpoints of both users and developers. In the first instance, a data mashup is developed on Yahoo! Pipes platform which can integrate and filter three RSS feeds provided by government websites in order to meet different user's demands. In the second instance, a mashup RESTful API is built on Ruby on rails framework, from which can export information from a government information database. It can provide information in two kinds of format. XML and Json. This API can return government information by the keyword which users provide so as to integrate these government information to Mashups. In order to verify the high value and ease of use features of the API. a JAVA program is developed on both sample-APIs developed in this paper and Taobao API on the internet. All these instances confirm the truth of values and feasibility of mashups applied in public libraries'government information disclosure service.