Description-based mashup of web applications

Abstract

The World Wide Web has become an almost limitless source of information. Mashup combines information or functionality from two or more existing Web sources to create a new Web page or application. Unfortunately, it is difficult for users without programming experiences to build mashups with existing Web applications, especially when they want to transfer information between Web applications which are used to build mashup. In this paper, we propose a description-based mashup approach for personal use which allows users without programming experiences to build mashup applications with existing Web applications as well as to transfer information between Web applications. This approach is based on information extraction, information transfer and functionality emulation methods. Our implementation shows that general Web applications can be used to build mashup applications easily without programming. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.