Conceptual design of sound, custom composition languages

Service composition, web mashups, and business process modeling are based on the composition and reuse of existing functionalities, user interfaces, or tasks. Composition tools typically come with their own, purposely built composition languages, based on composition techniques like data flow or control flow, and only with minor distinguishing features-besides the different syntax. Yet, all these composition languages are developed from scratch, without reference specifications (e.g., XML schemas), and by reasoning in terms of low-level language constructs. That is, there is neither reuse nor design support in the development of custom composition languages. We propose a conceptual design technique for the construction of custom composition languages that is based on a generic composition reference model and that fosters reuse. The approach is based on the abstraction of common composition techniques into high-level language features, a set of reference specifications for each feature, and the assembling of features into custom languages by guaranteeing their soundness. We specifically focus on mashup languages

Conceptual development of custom, domain-specific mashup platforms

Despite the common claim by mashup platforms that they enable end-users to develop their own software, in practice end-users still don't develop their own mashups, as the highly technical or inexistent user bases of today's mashup platforms testify. The key shortcoming of current platforms is their general-purpose nature, that privileges expressive power over intuitiveness. In our prior work, we have demonstrated that a domainspecific mashup approach, which privileges intuitiveness over expressive power, has much more potential to enable end-user development (EUD). The problem is that developing mashup platforms - domain-specific or not - is complex and time consuming. In addition, domain-specific mashup platforms by their very nature target only a small user basis, that is, the experts of the target domain, which makes their development not sustainable if it is not adequately supported and automated. With this article, we aim to make the development of custom, domain-specific mashup platforms costeffective. We describe a mashup tool development kit (MDK) that is able to automatically generate a mashup platform (comprising custom mashup and component description languages and design-time and runtime environments) from a conceptual design and to provision it as a service. We equip the kit with a dedicated development methodology and demonstrate the applicability and viability of the approach with the help of two case studies. © 2014 ACM

Distributed orchestration of user interfaces

Workflow management systems focus on the coordination of people and work items, service composition approaches on the coordination of service invocations, and, recently, web mashups have started focusing on the integration and coordination of pieces of user interfaces (UIs), e.g., a Google map, inside simple web pages. While these three approaches have evolved in a rather isolated fashion although they can be seen as evolution of the componentization and coordination idea from people to services to UIs in this paper we describe a component-based development paradigm that conciliates the core strengths of these three approaches inside a single model and language. We call this new paradigm distributed UI orchestration, so as to reflect the mashup-like and process-based nature of our target applications. In order to aid developers in implementing UI orchestrations, we equip the described model and language with suitable design, deployment, and runtime instruments, covering the whole life cycle of distributed UI orchestrations. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

ResEval Mash: A mashup tool for advanced research evaluation

In this demonstration, we present ResEval Mash, a mashup platform for research evaluation, i.e., for the assessment of the productivity or quality of researchers, teams, institutions, journals, and the like - a topic most of us are acquainted with. The platform is specifically tailored to the need of sourcing data about scientific publications and researchers from the Web, aggregating them, computing metrics (also complex and ad-hoc ones), and visualizing them. ResEval Mash is a hosted mashup platform with a clientside editor and runtime engine, both running inside a common web browser. It supports the processing of also large amounts of data, a feature that is achieved via the sensible distribution of the respective computation steps over client and server. Our preliminary user study shows that ResEval Mash indeed has the power to enable domain experts to develop own mashups (research evaluation metrics); other mashup platforms rather support skilled developers. The reason for this success is ResEval Mash's domain-specificity. Copyright is held by the International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2)

On the systematic development of domain-specific mashup tools for end users

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. In this paper, we propose a domain-specific approach to mashups 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 domain (research evaluation) and describe the respective user study. The results of the user study confirm that domain-specific mashup tools indeed lower the entry barrier to mashup development. © 2012 Springer-Verlag

From mashups to telco mashups: A survey

Given their increasing popularity and novel requirements and characteristics, telco mashups deserve an analysis that goes beyond what's available for mashups in general. Here, the authors cluster telco services into different types, analyze their features, derive a telco mashup reference architecture, and survey how well existing mashup tools can respond to these mashups' novel needs. © 2012 IEEE

Structural basis for isoform-specific kinesin-1 recognition of Y-acidic cargo adaptors

The light chains (KLCs) of the heterotetrameric microtubule motor kinesin-1, that bind to cargo adaptor proteins and regulate its activity, have a capacity to recognize short peptides via their tetratricopeptide repeat domains (KLC TPR ). Here, using X-ray crystallography, we show how kinesin-1 recognizes a novel class of adaptor motifs that we call \u2018Y-acidic\u2019 (tyrosine flanked by acidic residues), in a KLC-isoform specific manner. Binding specificities of Y-acidic motifs (present in JIP1 and in TorsinA) to KLC1 TPR are distinct from those utilized for the recognition of W-acidic motifs found in adaptors that are KLC-isoform non-selective. However, a partial overlap on their receptor binding sites implies that adaptors relying on Y-acidic and W-acidic motifs must act independently. We propose a model to explain why these two classes of motifs that bind to the concave surface of KLC TPR with similar low micromolar affinity can exhibit different capacities to promote kinesin-1 activity

Domain Specific Mashup Platforms as a Service

Since the Web 2.0 advent, Web users have gained more and more power moving their role from simple information consumers to producers. In line with this trend, mashup technologies have immediately attracted a lot of attention and many research investments since their birth. The big mashup promise was to bring application development to the masses, so that any Web-educated worker, also non-IT skilled, could implement his/her own situational applications (i.e., relatively small applications meant to address a temporary need of one or few persons) exploiting the simple paradigms and visual metaphors provided by mashup tools. After a decade from the first mashup tools, though, mashups are not really part of people’s everyday life and are still rather unknown technologies that — beside some exceptions — hardly find concrete application in the real world. During our research in this field our high-level goal was to foster the adoption of mashup technologies by end users. Aiming at this, we identified three main characteristics that must be reached by mashup technologies to get to the expected diffusion: (i) usefulness and (ii) usability for the end users and (iii) affordability for the developers of the respective mashup tools (in terms of required skills, time and cost). We identified lacks in these achievements as main hindering factors for the wide adoption of mashup technologies. Making mashup technologies useful, usable and affordable, therefore, are the three main challenges we addressed in our research work. This work contributes to the achievement of all these three major goals: first, by enabling a so-called universal integration paradigm, focussing on the creation of more powerful and complete mashups allowing data, application logic and user interface integration in one single language and tool; then, by introducing and developing domain specific mashup technologies, able to lower mashups’ complexity and make them usable by domain experts (i.e., end users expert of a given target domain); finally, by realizing a system able to generate domain specific mashup platforms as a service, basically relieving developers of platforms implementation and, therefore, making platform development affordable. This thesis specifically focusses on the last two points, i.e., on the domain specific mashup approach and on the semi-automatic generation of domain specific mashup platforms