Diversity of the Mashup Ecosystem

Mashups allow users to develop applications from a variety of open APIs. The creation of mashups is supported by a complex ecosystem of interconnected data providers, mashup platforms, and users. A sign of a healthy ecosystem is that the number and diversity of APIs and mashups in the ecosystem increases continuously. In this paper, we describe a model of the evolution of the mashup ecosystem that allows us to estimate the diversification of the mashup ecosystem over time. In this model we show the evolutionary relationships between mashups as branches in a phylogenetic tree. We discuss how the diversification rate of the mashup ecosystem can be estimated by fitting this tree to a birth-death process model. The results of our research show that the diversity of the mashup ecosystem is increasing with time, however, not monotonically.