Its good to see OCLC following us, in producing a screen shot of a Google Maps demo. As preview-announced by Thom Hickey in Outgoing and discussed as an example of using Web 2.0 Platform Services by Lorcan Dempsey in his blog posting Libraries, maps and platforms.

They are both correct to identify:

This sort of thing is possible to do quickly because of the open way that the Google maps is implemented as web services.

What we are looking at here are ‘platform’ services, using ‘platform’ in a Web 2.0sort of way. In this sense, a platform is a resource which makes services available through machine interfaces. Others build applications drawing on platform services through APIs/web services. Amazon, Google and eBay are major platform service providers.

As with our Silkworm demonstration [Screencast - ] they have used the Google Maps Service to add-value to one of their services – Open WorldCat.

As Lorcan points out The Talis Silkworm initiative is explicitly positioned as a ‘horizontal’ platform play in an environment of vertical ILS application builders. The demonstration shows how Silkworm Directory and Deep-Link Access Services can be used to deliver innovative new Wapplications [new word of mine to describe applications constructed from Web 2.0 style services, distributed across the network - I bet it doesn't catch on]. The diagram at the end of the screencast shows how the services are pulled together to construct it with very little [this application specific] code living anywhere.

For more on Silkworm checkout the Silkworm web site. I can recommend the White Paper [pdf] and the other demo
screencast, which incidentally utilizes OCLC’s xISBN service.