Creating a Mashup, a web application that integrates data from multiple web sources to provide a unique service, involves solving multiple problems, such as extracting data from multiple web sources, cleaning it, and combining it together. Existing work relies on a widget paradigm where users address those problems during a Mashup building process by selecting, customizing, and connecting widgets together. While these systems claim that their users do not have to write a single line of code, merely abstracting programming methods into widgets has several disadvantages. First, as the number of widgets increases to support more operations, locating the right widget for the task can be confusing and time consuming. Second, customizing and connecting these widgets usually requires users to understand programming concepts. In this paper, we present a Mashup building approach that (a) combines most problem areas in Mashup building into a unified interactive framework that requires no widgets, and (b) allows users with no programming background to easily create Mashups by example.

Mashups are an increasingly popular way to integrate data from multiple web sites to fit a particular need, but it often requires substantial technical expertise to create them. To lower the barrier for creating mashups, we have extended the CoScripter web automation tool with a spreadsheet-like environment called Vegemite. Our system uses directmanipulation and programming-by-demonstration techniques to automatically populate tables with information collected from various web sites. A particular strength of our approach is its ability to augment a data set with new values computed by a web site, such as determining the driving distance from a particular location to each of the addresses in a data set. An informal user study suggests that Vegemite may enable a wider class of users to address their information needs. Author Keywords End-user programming, programming by demonstration,

We present reform, a system that envisions roles for both programmers and end users in enhancing existing websites to support new goals. First, programmers author a traditional mashup or browser extension, but they do not write a web scraper. Instead they use reform, which allows novice end users to attach the enhancement to their favorite sites with a scraping by-example interface. reform makes enhancements easier to program while also carrying the benefit that end users can apply the enhancements to any number of new websites. We present reform’s architecture, user interface, interactive by-example extraction algorithm for novices, and evaluation, along with five example reform enabled enhancements. This is a step toward write-once, apply-anywhere user interface enhancements. Author Keywords: web data extraction, mashups, programming by example, end-user programming ACM Classification: H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation: User Interfaces.

Many Web applications are based on dynamic interactions between Web components exchanging flows of information. Such a situation arises for instance in mashup systems or when monitoring distributed autonomous systems. Our work is in this challenging context that has generated recently a lot of attention; see Web 2.0. We introduce the axlog formal model for capturing such interactions and show how this model can be supported efficiently. The central component is the axlog widget defined by one tree-pattern query or more, over an active document (in the Active XML style) that includes some input streams of updates. A widget generates a stream of updates for each query, the updates that are needed to maintain the view corresponding to the query. We exploit an array of known technologies: datalog optimization techniques such as Differential or MagicSet, constraint query languages, and efficient XML filtering (YFilter). The novel optimization technique we propose is based on fundamental new notions: a relevance (different than that of MagicSet), satisfiability and provenance for active documents. We briefly discuss an implementation of an axlog engine, an application that we used to test the approach, and results of experiments. 1.

This paper presents an end-user-oriented programming environment called Mashroom. Major contributions herein include an end-user programming model with an expressive data structure as well as a set of formally-defined mashup operators. The data structure takes advantage of nested table, and maintains the intuitiveness while allowing users to express complex data objects. The mashup operators are visualized with contextual menu and formula bar and can be directly applied on the data. Experiments and case studies reveal that end users have little difficulty in effectively and efficiently using Mashroom to build mashup applications. Categories and Subject Descriptors

Intel ® Mash Maker is an interactive tool that tracks what the user is doing and tries to infer what information and visualizations they might find useful for their current task. Mash Maker uses structured data from existing web sites to create new “mashed up ” interfaces combining information from many sources. The Intel ® Mash Maker client is currently implemented as an extension to the FireFox web browser. Mash Maker adds a toolbar to the browser that shows buttons representing enhancements that Mash Maker believes the user might want to apply to the current page. An enhancement might combine the data on the page with data from another source, or visualize data in a new way. Mash Maker is intended to be an integral part of the way the user browses information, rather than being a special tool that a user uses when they want to create mashups. In order to create mashups from normal websites, Mash Maker must first extract structured data from them. If the web site does not provide RDF data, then Mash Maker extracts structured data from the raw HTML using a community-maintained database of extractors, where each extractor describes how to extract structured data from a particular kind of web site.

We present reform, a system that envisions roles for both programmers and end users in enhancing existing websites to support new goals. First, programmers author a traditional mashup or browser extension, but they do not write a web scraper. Instead they use reform, which allows novice end users to attach the enhancement to their favorite sites with a scraping by-example interface. reform makes enhancements easier to program while also carrying the benefit that end users can apply the enhancements to any number of new websites. We present reform’s architecture, user interface, interactive by-example extraction algorithm for novices, and evaluation, along with five example reform enabled enhancements. This is a step toward write-once, apply-anywhere user interface enhancements. Author Keywords: web data extraction, mashups, programming by example, end-user programming ACM Classification: H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation: User Interfaces.

[H.5.2] Information interfaces and presentation

The use of RDF data published on the Web for applications is still a cumbersome and resource-intensive task due to the limited software support and the lack of standard programming paradigms to deal with everyday problems such as combination of RDF data from different sources, object identifier consolidation, ontology alignment and mediation, or plain querying and filtering tasks. In this paper we present Semantic Web Pipes that support fast implementation of Semantic data mash-ups while preserving desirable properties such as abstraction, encapsulation, component-orientation, code re-usability and maintainability which are common and well supported in other application areas. Categories and Subject Descriptors:

This paper presents the design, theory and implementation of GLOVES 1, a domain-specific language that allows users to specify the provenance (the derivation history starting from the origins), syntax and semantic properties of collections of distributed data sources. In particular, GLOVES specifications indicate where to locate desired data, how to obtain it, when to get it or to give up trying, and what format it will be in on arrival. The GLOVES system compiles such specification into a suite of data-processing tools including an archiver, a provenance tracking system, a database loading tool, an alert system, an RSS feed generator and a debugging tool. In addition, the system generates description-specific libraries so that developers can create their own applications. GLOVES also provides a generic infrastructure so that advanced users can build new tools applicable to any data source with a GLOVES description. We show how GLOVES may be used to specify data sources from two domains: CoMon, a monitoring system for PlanetLab’s 800+ nodes, and Arrakis, a monitoring system for an AT&T web hosting service. We show experimentally that our system can scale to distributed systems the size of CoMon. Finally, we provide a denotational semantics for GLOVES and use this semantics to prove two important theorems. The first shows that our denotational semantics respects the typing rules for the language, while the second demonstrates that our system correctly maintains the provenance.