Integrating OJS and SNEEP

A little while ago I blogged about the implementation of SNEEP (Social Networking Extensions for Eprints) in the SAS-Space repository.With thanks to Rory McNicholl, here is a report on the next step. Rory writes:

"The next step was to integrate SNEEP content from SAS-Space into the OJS interface. Thankfully SNEEP has a RESTful API (more than by happy accident than by design), so making requests of it was reasonably straightforward. A proxy script (sneep_proxy.php) that utilised cURL was added to the OJS docroot to deal with any inter-domain AJAX requests. Using the SWORD-deposit condition within the OJS article template the necessary javascript and html was inserted. This allowed OJS to display tags and comments associated with the repository item. See it in action here.

There is a caveat: this rather simple integration with SNEEP only uses the publicly accessible content and functions. The private notes that users can add in SAS-Space are not displayed. Neither is it yet possible for users to add tags and comments in OJS directly. 

Further integration of SNEEP and OJS would require more work on the sharing of authentication. Single sign-on for SNEEPish authentication was one of the matters explored in the JJISC-funded PICT project. However in this case we wanted the user-generated content to be the same between the OJS and Repository pages; a different relationship to the one set up by PICT. In this particular case, the fact that both SAS-Space and SAS Open Journals use the University of London LDAP authentication server may mean that there is scope for overcoming SNEEP user-identification-from-a-far, with further work, with different funding.