A number of cases have arisen in which an external application needs to access user data in Synapse.
Use cases:
1) OneMind Portal
The OneMind Portal is a web-based aggregator of applications, one of which is Synapse. One goal is single-sign-on, such that users can sign on with any of a variety of web-based identities, and automatically be signed on to each of the aggregated applications. The OneMind Portal uses Janrain, which allows users to sign-on with any of Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc., and to "link" their accounts together so that, for example, logging in with Twitter causes them to also be logged in to LinkedIn and Google. The missing piece is to allow a OneMind Portal user to "link" their Synapse account, so that logging in with Janrain causes them to be logged into Synapse.
2) IBM cell modeling challenge
3) Shiny integration
Shiny is a web-based generator of web-viewable R content, e.g. interactive graphs.