A combinatory framework of Web 2.0 mashup tools,OWL-S and UDDI

The increasing number of Web 2.0 applications, such as wikis or social networking sites, indicates a movement to large-scale collaborative and social Web activities. Users can share information, add value to Web applications by using them or aggregate data from different sources creating Web applications (mashups) using specialized tools (mashup tools). However, Web 2.0 is not a new technology, but it rather embraces a new philosophy, treating the Internet as a platform. Several issues related to the Semantic Web vision, such as interoperability or machine understandable data semantics, are not tackled by Web 2.0. In this paper, we present our effort to combine semantic Web services (SWS) discovery frameworks, UDDI repositories and existing mashup tools in order to enhance the procedure of developing mashups with semantic mashup discovery capabilities. Towards this end, we introduce a social-oriented extension of OWL-S advertisements, their mapping algorithm on UDDI repositories and a semantic mashup discovery algorithm. Finally, we elaborate on the way our framework has been realized using the Yahoo Pipes mashup tool.     

Understanding Mashup Development

Web mashups are Web applications developed using contents and services available online. Despite rapidly increasing interest in mashups over the past two years, comprehensive development tools and frameworks are lacking, and in most cases mashing up a new application implies a significant manual programming effort. This article overviews current tools, frameworks, and trends that aim to facilitate mashup development. The authors use a set of characteristic dimensions to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of some representative approaches.     

iMashup: a mashup-based framework for service composition

The Web has undergone a tremendous change from a primarily publication platform towards a participatory and"programmable"platform,where a large number of heterogeneous Web-delivered services(including SOAP and RESTful Web services,RSS and Atom feeds)are emerging.It results in the creation of Web mashup applications with rich user experiences.However,the integration of Web-delivered services is still a challenging issue.It not only requires the developers’tedious eforts in understanding and coordinating heterogeneous service types,but also results in the time-consuming development of user interfaces.In this paper,we propose the iMashup composition framework to facilitate mashup development and deployment.We provide a unified mashup component model for the common representation of heterogeneous Web-delivered service interfaces.The component model specifies necessary properties and behaviors at both business and user interface level.We associate the component model with semantically meaningful tags,so that mashup developers can fast understand the service capabilities.The mashup developers can search and put the proper mashup components into the Web browser based composition environment,and connect them by data flows based on the tag-based semantics.Such an integration manner might prevent some low-level programming eforts and improve the composition efciency.A series of experimental study are conducted to evaluate our framework.     

End-User Development of Mashups with NaturalMash

Context: The emergence of the long-tail in the market of software applications is shifting the role of end-users from mere consumers to becoming developers of applications addressing their unique, personal, and transient needs. On the Web, a popular form of such applications is called mashup, built out of the lightweight composition of Web APIs (reusable software components delivered as a service through the Web). To enable end-users to build mashups, there is a key problem that must be overcome: End-users lack programming knowledge as well as the interest to learn how to master the complex set of Web technologies required to develop mashups. End-User Development (EUD) is an emerging research field dealing with this type of problems. Its main goal is to design tools and techniques facilitating the development of software applications by non-programmers.Objective: The paper describes the design and evaluation of NaturalMash, an innovative EUD tool for mashups (a mashup tool). NaturalMash aims at enabling non-professional users without any knowledge of programming languages and skills to create feature-rich, interactive, and useful mashups.Methods: The design of NaturalMash adopts a formative evaluation approach, and has completed three design and evaluation iterations. The formative evaluations utilize usability testing, think aloud protocol, questionnaires, observation, and unstructured interviews. Additionally, we compare the expressive power of naturalmash with the state-of-the-art mashup tools.Results: The results from the formative evaluations helped us identify important usability problems. From an assessment point of view, the results were promising and sggested that the proposed tool has a short and gentle learning curve in a way that even non-programmers are able to rapidly build useful mashups. Also, the comparative evaluation results showed that NaturalMash offers a competitive level of expressive power compared with existing mashup tools targeting non-programmers.Conclusion: As the evaluation results indicate, NaturalMash provides a high level of expressive power while it is still highly usable by non-programmers. These suggest that we have successfully achieved the objective of the proposed tool, distinguishing it from existing mashup tools that are either too limited or highly specialized for non-professional users.     

Data-driven synthesis of multiple recommendation patterns to create situational Web mashups

As a typical situational application,Web mashup reflects and accommodates some key features of Internetware paradigm.Mashup provides a development fashion that integrates data,computation and UI elements from multiple resources into a single Web application,and promises the quick rollout of creating potential new functionalities opportunistically.This paper focuses on the problem of recommending useful suggestions for developing data-driven mashups by synthesis of multiple patterns.We present a rapid and intuitive system called iMashupAdvisor,for aiding mashup development based on a novel automated suggestion mechanism.The key observation guiding the development of iMashupAdvisor is that mashups developed by different users might share some common patterns,for instance,selecting similar mashup components for similar goals,and gluing them in a similar manner.Such patterns could reside in multiple sources,e.g.,the data dependency between mashup components,the interaction between users and mashup components,or the collective intelligence from existing applications created and maintained by programmers,etc.iMashupAdvisor leverages the synthesis of these patterns to recommend useful suggestions for a partial mashup,such as the missing components,connections between them,or potentially relevant options,to assist mashup completion.This paper presents the data model and ranking metrics of the synthesis process,and introduces efficient algorithms for the retrieval of recommendations.We also experimentally demonstrate the efficiency of our approach for benefiting the proposed rapid mashup development.     

移动终端应用的个性化混搭方法

随着移动互联网的发展,Mashup混搭技术逐渐延伸到移动终端领域。然而目前的移动端Mashup研究主要关注于如何调用后台Web API,却没有将移动端数量庞大的移动应用作为主要的混搭对象进行研究。论文目标是将移动应用、Android框架层API、Web API等各种服务统一视为混搭的基本组件,研究移动端的应用混搭与整合机制,实现APP间的通信,控制APP的执行顺序及相互间的交互与协作,从而满足用户个性化需求。为了消除异构服务间的差异性,提取服务的功能信息构造抽象服务层,封装和屏蔽异构服务调用方式以及输入输出数据类型的差异。定义了描述移动终端应用间混搭的描述型语言,移动终端用户可以DIY式创建满足个性化需求的移动终端Mashup方案。通过一个具体案例展示和验证了方法的有效性。     

Web service API recommendation for automated mashup creation using multi-objective evolutionary search

Modern software development builds on external Web services reuse as a promising way that allows developers delivering feature-rich software by composing existing Web service Application Programming Interfaces, known as APIs. With the overwhelming number of Web services that are available on the Internet, finding the appropriate Web services for automatic service composition, i.e., mashup creation, has become a time-consuming, difficult, and error-prone task for software designers and developers when done manually. To help developers, a number of approaches and techniques have been proposed to automatically recommend Web services. However, they mostly focus on recommending individual services. Nevertheless, in practice, service APIs are intended to be used together forming a social network between different APIs, thus should be recommended collectively. In this paper, we introduce a novel automated approach, called SerFinder, to recommend service sets for automatic mashup creation. We formulate the service set recommendation as a multi-objective combinatorial problem and use the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) as a search method to extract an optimal set of services to create a given mashup. We aim at guiding the search process towards generating the adequate compromise among three objectives to be optimized (i) maximize services historical co-usage, (ii) maximize services functional matching with the mashup requirements, and (iii) maximize services functional diversity. We perform a large-scale empirical experiment to evaluate SerFinder on a benchmark of real-world mashups and services. The obtained results demonstrate the effectiveness of SerFinder in comparison with recent existing approaches for mashup creation and services recommendation. The statistical analysis results provide an empirical evidence that SerFinder, significantly outperforms four state-of-the-art widely-used multi-objective search-based algorithms as well as random search.     

Visual modeling for Web 2.0 applications using model driven architecture approach

Mashup is now a major Web 2.0 technology because, rather than simply aggregating Web content, it combines various Web resources from other websites. Considering Web 2.0 mashups from a software engineering perspective, a visual modeling approach is crucial. Current Web 2.0 developments, however, do not support a conceptual modelling for Web 2.0 applications. This leads to inefficient development processes and a low potential for reuse. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a general-purpose modeling language that may be used in widely varying application domains. However, UML often lacks elements for modeling and representing concrete concepts of specific domains such as Web 2.0 mashup modeling. To address these shortcomings, this study proposes Web2.0MUML, a Model Driven Architecture (MDA) approach and UML profile for modeling Web 2.0 mashups. The Web2.0MUML profile extends UML by using a profile mechanism for Web 2.0 mashup modeling that presents the relevant structural properties of Web 2.0 at the conceptual level.     

Composing enterprise mashup components and services using architecture integration patterns

Enterprise mashups leverage various source of information to compose new situational applications. The architecture of such applications must address integration issues: it needs to deal with heterogeneous local and/or public data sources, and build value-added applications on existing corporate IT systems. In this paper, we leverage enterprise architecture integration patterns to compose reusable mashup components. We present a service oriented architecture that addresses reusability and integration needs for building enterprise mashup applications. Key techniques to customize this architecture are developed for mashups with themed data on location maps. The usage of this architecture is illustrated by a property valuation application derived from a real-world scenario. We demonstrate and discuss how this state-of-the-art architecture design method can be applied to enhance the design and development of emerging enterprise mashups.     

Biomashups: the new world of exploratory bioinformatics?

Bioinformatics is dominated by online databases and sophisticated web‐accessible tools. As such, it is ideally placed to benefit from the rapid, purpose specific combination of services achievable via web mashups. The recent introduction of a number of sophisticated frameworks has greatly simplified the mashup creation process, making them accessible to scientists with limited programming expertise. In this paper we investigate the feasibility of mashups as a new approach to bioinformatic experimentation, focusing on an exploratory niche between interactive web usage and robust workflows, and attempting to identify the range of computations for which mashups may be employed. While we treat each of the major frameworks, we illustrate the ideas with a series of examples developed under the Popfly framework ^‡ . Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

基于数据流程变换的Mashup性能优化方法

Mashup是一种流行的web2.0应用,由开发者将互联网上多个web数据源的数据进行聚合构建而成.大多数mashup工具支持通过可视化的数据流程设计来开发mashup,但是缺少编程经验的终端用户设计的数据流程可能执行效率很低,当处理较大规模数据时mashup的响应时间会大幅增加.本文研究如何通过数据处理操作的合并拆分、次序交换、并行化等技术实现mashup的数据流程优化,提高mashup的性能及可扩展性.本文提出一种新的mashup性能优化方法,对多样化的mashup组件标注其操作语义特征属性及代价模型,定义适用于mashup的流程变换规则,针对用户设计的rnashup数据流程生成所有与其语义等价的流程,并提出算法建立流程之间的代价偏序关系图从而快速选择执行代价最小的流程.文中实现了一个mashup工具,实验表明该方法可以有效提高终端用户设计的mashup的执行效率.     

A formal framework for service mashups with dynamic service selection

The service mashup programming paradigm is a blooming faction of service oriented Architecture for developing web applications. A mashup application constructs its functionality by combining data, presentation and functionalities obtained from online services published by service providers such as Google and Amazon. This paradigm significantly facilitates the implementation of application and reduces the workload. But it also makes the application rely on the availability and qualities of the online services which beyond its control in which case the robustness of the system requires more concern. This paper proposes a formal model to specify and analyze the behavior and robustness of service mashups under a certain environment where some services may become unavailable. The specification contains both system specification and environment situation. Refinement theory are employed to specify the correctness of dynamic service selection. The framework realizes the service selection by allowing virtual service requests to be handled by any online service having consistent interface and refined functionality. The framework provides a clear definition of the robustness of mashup systems and proposes several rules as well as approaches to preserve the robustness during the development and maintenance of the system.     

Proposing a context-aware enterprise mashup readiness assessment framework

Web mashups have received a lot of attention recently as more enterprises are engaged in enterprise 2.0 initiatives. So far, there is insufficient research on the adoption and diffusion of Web mashups in an enterprise context. In this paper, we discussed the benefits and issues associated with enterprise mashups. We proposed a context-aware enterprise mashup readiness assessment framework to help enterprise managers and decision makers determine their needs and readiness for enterprise mashups. A case study was conducted to verify the usefulness of the proposed framework. The results show that our work can be used to guide enterprises with their decision making for the adoption of enterprise mashups and thus contribute to the development of a rigorous strategy for enterprise mashup adoption, development and diffusion.     

Mashing Up Search Services

Mashup languages offer new graphic interfaces for service composition. Normally, composition is limited to simple services, such as RSS or Atom feeds, but users can potentially use visual mashup languages for complex service compositions, with typed parameters and well-defined I/O interfaces. Composing search services introduces new issues, however, such as determining the optimal sequence of search invocations and separately composing ranked entries into a globally ranked result. Enabling end users to mash up services through suitable abstractions and tools is a viable option for improving service-based computations.     

An Online Platform for Web APIs and Service Mashups

On the newly programmable Web, mashups are flourishing. Designers create mashups by combining components of existing Web sites and applications. Although rapid mashup proliferation offers many opportunities, a lack of standarization and compatibility offers considerable challenges. IBM Sharable Code is an online service platform for developing and sharing situational Web 2.0 applications and mashups. The platform is based on an innovative domain-specific language that streamlines and standardizes the development and deployment of applications consuming and exposing Web APIs. Parts of the DSL and the resulting applications and mashups can be shared and reused by members of the IBM Sharable Code community. In this article, the authors offer an overview of the platform's architecture and the DSL language at its core.     

Composing RESTful Services and Collaborative Workflows: A Lightweight Approach

The use of RESTful Web services has gained momentum in the development of distributed applications based on traditional Web standards such as HTTP. In particular, these services can integrate easily into various applications, such as mashups. Composing RESTful services into Web-scale workflows requires a lightweight composition language that's capable of describing both the control and data flow that constitute a workflow. The authors address these issues with Bite, a lightweight and extensible composition language that enables the creation of Web-scale workflows and uses RESTful services as its main composable entities.     

Knowledge Discovery in Services

Service mashups can be useful in understanding Web-scale workflows. Although creating a service mashup shares similar challenges with data integration, a more exciting aspect of this area is the ability to predict which services are viable candidates for a mashup. Such "service mashup recommendations" can enable knowledge discovery, an approach the author calls knowledge discovery in services (KDS).     

An environment for End-User Development of Web mashups

End-User Development aims to find novel ways that are suitable and intuitive for end users to create their own applications. We present a graphical environment in which users create new mashups by directly selecting interaction elements, content and functionalities from existing Web applications without requiring the intervention of expert developers. Then, users just need to exploit a copy–paste metaphor to indicate how to compose the selected interactive content and functionalities in the new mashup. The environment is enabled by a Web-based platform accessible from any browser, and is suitable for users without particular programming skills. We describe the architecture of our platform and how it works, including its intelligent support, show example applications, and report the results of first user studies.     

End-user composition of interactive applications through actionable UI components

Developing interactive systems to access and manipulate data is a very tough task. In particular, the development of user interfaces (UIs) is one of the most time-consuming activities in the software lifecycle. This is even more demanding when data have to be retrieved by accessing flexibly different online resources. Indeed, software development is moving more and more toward composite applications that aggregate on the fly specific Web services and APIs. In this article, we present a mashup model that describes the integration, at the presentation layer, of UI components. The goal is to allow non-technical end users to visualize and manipulate (i.e., to perform actions on) the data displayed by the components, which thus become actionable UI components. This article shows how the model has guided the development of a mashup platform through which non-technical end users can create component-based interactive workspaces via the aggregation and manipulation of data fetched from distributed online resources. Due to the abundance of online data sources, facilitating the creation of such interactive workspaces is a very relevant need that emerges in different contexts. A utilization study has been performed in order to assess the benefits of the proposed model and of the Actionable UI Components; participants were required to perform real tasks using the mashup platform. The study results are reported and discussed.