# /research/holidaycard/about.html

originally: http://www.oclc.org/research/holidaycard/about.html

## About the OCLC Programs and Research Holiday Card

Our holiday card was created using Adobe Flex 2. Flex is relatively new software intended to create cross-platform Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) that play in Adobe’s Flash Player.

What's an RIA? Well, it’s a fancy term for Web applications that feel like desktop applications to the user, and that run identically in all major browsers regardless of operating system.

What we really like about Flex are the built-in, ready-to-go data visualization tools it provides. (We used the Pie Chart.) Also, Flex is one of our new toys and what better time of the year than the holidays to play with new toys?

Data for the holiday card come from WorldCat.org and two OCLC Research projects, WorldCat Identities and DeweyBrowser. Clicking on the tag cloud and the pie chart allow the user to display and interact with those services.

Caveats: Words and phrases in Dutch, English, French, German, and Spanish have been drawn from various sources and are intended to be equivalent labels for the same concepts, but some license has been taken with choices of words and phrases. The queries are not always built strictly from the words or phrases displayed, and in some cases may not query the same index in WorldCat.org. We also apologize in advance for any errors in translation. These liberties have been taken in the spirit of building an engaging prototype as a Flex application. We encourage you to take a relaxed attitude towards exploring the Holiday Card as we tried to take a relaxed and fun approach to building it.

### Links

Holiday Card Download Flash Player 9 Adobe Flex Product Page Send us a comment about the holiday card.

### Team Holiday Card

- Jeremy Browning—Software Engineer
- Eric Childress—Data Collection
- J.D. Shipengrover —Design