Engineering applications over social and open data with domain-specific languages

Abstract

There is a current trend among governments and organizations to make all sort of information (like budgets, demographic or economic data) public. The information released in this way is called Open Data. Many institutions promote the creation of innovative applications using the data they have released, e.g., in combination with social networks, but only highly skilled engineers can accomplish this task. Our goal is to facilitate the construction of applications using open data and social networks as communication platform. For this purpose, we propose a family of domain-specific languages directed to automate the different tasks involved, like describing the structure and semantics of the heterogeneous data sets, the patterns to be sought in social network messages, the information to be extracted from static and dynamic data and the messages (over social networks) that the system needs to produce. We have built an extensible working prototype, which allows adding new open data formats and support for different social networks.