The mashup ecosystem

Abstract

The web is growing quickly, substructures are coming up: a (social, semantic, etc.) web, or the (business, services, etc.) ecosystem which includes all resources of a specific web habitat. In the mashup ecosystem, developers are in intense scientific activity, what is easily measured by the number of their recent papers. Since mashups inherit an opportunistic (participatory) attitude, a main point of research is enabling users to create situation-specific mashups with little effort. After an overview, the chapter highlights areas of intensive discussion one by one: mashup description and modeling, semantic mashups, media mashups, ubiquitous mashups and end-user related development. Information is organized in two levels: right under the headings, a block of topic-related references may pop up. It is addressed to readers with deeper interest. After that, the text for everybody explains and illustrates innovative approaches. The chapter ends with an almost fail-safe outlook: given the growth of the web, the ecosystem of mashups will keep branching out. Core mashup features such as reuse of resources, user orientation, and versatile coordination (loose coupling) of components will propagate.