End Users Developing Mashups

The idea of mashups opens up access to the wealth of on-line information, allowing information-providing services to be discovered, integrated and presented in a manner tuned to the needs of information users at the point of need. The uptake of mashup environments at present is hindered by the fact that most information consumers do not have programming background and thus find it difficult to work with the predominantly technology-driven environments and systems available at present. Indeed, many researchers attempt to address the general public by going beyond programming scripts and offering interactive visual representations connecting different information-providing service components into an assembly, yet the underlying technique such as event-driven processing is still the shaping force behind the visual interface and hence difficult to understand by users. In contrast to the majority of these, we did not start with the technology but with the users - service producers and consumers, and studied the core issues which should be resolved before people who are not programmers can start to assemble services into meaningful applications, over and above the presentation-level integration offered by current mash-up environments. The result is an approach to assisted service composition designed for end users, which uses semantic technologies to shield users from the irrelevant complexity of service technology, from the heterogeneity of the information and from the need to manually resolve dependencies between services. A tool has been developed to help us validate the approach through two observational studies of non-programmers. The studies confirmed the enabling effect of the approach, and generated suggestions for further work at the levels of both the approach and the tool.