On integrating data services using data mashups

Abstract

Mashups are applications that aggregate functionality, presentation, and/or contents from existing sources to create a new application. Contents are usually generated either using web feeds or an application programming interface (API). Both approaches have limitations as web feeds do not provide powerful data models for complex data structures and lack powerful features of database systems. On the other hand, API's are usually limited to a specific application thus requiring different implementations for each of the sources used in the mashups. We propose a query based aggregation of multiple heterogeneous data sources by combining powerful querying features of XQuery and SPARQL with an easy interface of a mashup tool for data sources in XML and RDF. Our mashup editor allows for automatic generation of mashups with an easy to use visual interface. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.