Building Mashups By Example

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Summary:

Rattapoom Tuchinda, Pedro Szekely and Craig Knoblock of the University of Southern California's Information Science Institute present their research on building internet mashups in this paper.  A mashup is a web application that integrates data from multiple web sources to provide a unique service.  Many tools exist for creating mashups that ostensibly accommodate non-programmers, relying on things like widget controls to execute their functions, but these tools are usually confusing or do in fact rely on the user's understanding of programming concepts in order to function.  The authors briefly discussed several existing tools and the main issues of creating mashups - data retrieval, source modeling, data cleaning, data integration, and data visualization.  They then presented their own mashup builder, Karma, which they posited would solve the problems with other mashup-creation tools.

Basically, users can drag data from the browser on the left into the table on the right to "extract" it, after which Karma will help them assign attribute names, clean and integrate the data.  The authors discussed the implementation of each step of the process as realized by  Karma in detail.  They held an evaluation comparing Karma to mashup tools Dapper and Pipes to see if it made mashup creation easier and faster; an expert was tasked with carrying out three mashup building tasks and the researchers tallied how many "steps" the user took for each process in the task.  Overall, Karma outperformed the other two systems, consistently taking fewer steps to achieve the same results.

Discussion:

I have to be honest: after reading this paper and even looking at a few examples cited by the authors, I still can't really tell what a mashup is or what its purpose might be.  All of the things I saw looked like spruced-up RSS feeds or link dumps...maybe that's what a mashup is supposed to accomplish?  Karma certainly seemed up to the task of creating one, I guess, but it didn't help me figure out what a mashup was.  I even went to MashupCamp to see what all the fuss was about, and the first sentence I read in their about page said, "Ask 10 self-proclaimed mashup developers what a mashup is and you might get 10 different answers."  Thanks for the illumination, MashupCamp.