Information Quality Information Quality in Mashups Information Quality in Mashups Quality and Mashup Development

30 Published by the IEEE Computer Society 1089-7801/10/$26.00 © 2010 IEEE IEEE INTERNET COMPUTING M ashups are applications developed by integrating content and functionality sourced from the Web. Although in most cases, enthusiastic programmers hand write them, the recent emergence of so-called mashup tools or mashup platforms, such as Yahoo Pipes (http://pipes.yahoo.com), Dapper (www.dapper.net/open/), or Intel Mash Maker (http://mashmaker. intel.com), has significantly lowered the barriers to mashup development, letting unskilled Web users easily assemble their own applications. Mashups typically integrate heterogeneous elements available on the Web, such as RSS/Atom feeds, Web services, content scraped from third-party websites, or widgets (such as Google Maps). Different kinds of mashups reuse user interface (UI) components to build the composite application’s UI, leverage and require external computational services, or simply integrate multiple plain data sources. Emerging technologies such as Web services, UI widget libraries, and tool-specific mashup (meta) models have significantly simplified access to and reuse of such building blocks, leading to a component-oriented paradigm that many current mashup platforms share. This paradigm especially facilitates the development of so-called situational applications1 — that is, applications where the developer is also the final user and that serve a highly focused purpose (for example, let you Modern Web 2.0 applications are characterized by high user involvement: