Consumer mashups with Mashlight

Abstract

Mashlight is a lightweight service composition framework for creating process mashups out of Web 2.0 widgets. Widgets represent a simple means to access heterogenous services on the web that non-technical users can easily comprehend. The framework provides a well-defined conceptual model that defines both the notion of composable widget, and how to aggregate them through appropriate control and data flows. It also provides a set of design-time tools for creating widgets and process mashups, a desktop browser-based execution environment, and mobile environments for iOS and Android smartphones. In this paper we illustrate Mashlight's core concepts, and place emphasis on the use of already existing mashups to dynamically configure and create new ones. This way users can exploit applications that fully meet their needs without programming them directly. The paper presents a detailed example in the tourism space. Consumers first use a process to search for touristic venues in a city they want to visit; then they use a personalized and automatically generated process to manage bookings for those venues. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.