The recent emergence of mashup tools has refueled research on end-user development, i.e., on enabling end-users without programming skills to compose their own applications. Yet, similar to what happened with analogous promises in web service composition and business process management, research has mostly focused on technology and, as a consequence, has failed its objective. Plain technology (e.g., SOAP/WSDL web services) or simple modeling languages (e.g., Yahoo! Pipes) don’t convey enough meaning to non-programmers. In this article, we propose a domain-specific approach to mashups that 'speaks the language of the user', i.e., that is aware of the terminology, concepts, rules, and conventions (the domain) the user is comfortable with. We show what developing a domain-specific mashup tool means, which role the mashup meta-model and the domain model play and how these can be merged into a domain-specific mashup meta-model. We exemplify the approach by implementing a mashup tool for a specific scenario (research evaluation) and describe the respective user study. The results of a first user study confirm that domain-specific mashup tools indeed lower the entry barrier to mashup development

Developing Mashup Tools for End-Users: On the Importance of the Application Domain.

Daniel, Florian;Imran, Muhammad;Soi, Stefano;De Angeli, Antonella;Wilkinson, Christopher Raphael;Casati, Fabio;Marchese, Maurizio
2012-01-01

Abstract

The recent emergence of mashup tools has refueled research on end-user development, i.e., on enabling end-users without programming skills to compose their own applications. Yet, similar to what happened with analogous promises in web service composition and business process management, research has mostly focused on technology and, as a consequence, has failed its objective. Plain technology (e.g., SOAP/WSDL web services) or simple modeling languages (e.g., Yahoo! Pipes) don’t convey enough meaning to non-programmers. In this article, we propose a domain-specific approach to mashups that 'speaks the language of the user', i.e., that is aware of the terminology, concepts, rules, and conventions (the domain) the user is comfortable with. We show what developing a domain-specific mashup tool means, which role the mashup meta-model and the domain model play and how these can be merged into a domain-specific mashup meta-model. We exemplify the approach by implementing a mashup tool for a specific scenario (research evaluation) and describe the respective user study. The results of a first user study confirm that domain-specific mashup tools indeed lower the entry barrier to mashup development
2012
2
Daniel, Florian; Imran, Muhammad; Soi, Stefano; De Angeli, Antonella; Wilkinson, Christopher Raphael; Casati, Fabio; Marchese, Maurizio
File in questo prodotto:
Non ci sono file associati a questo prodotto.

I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione

Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11572/95406
 Attenzione

Attenzione! I dati visualizzati non sono stati sottoposti a validazione da parte dell'ateneo

Citazioni
  • ???jsp.display-item.citation.pmc??? ND
  • Scopus 4
  • ???jsp.display-item.citation.isi??? ND
social impact