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Nowadays, mashups applications are growing in popularity. They are accessible by cross-device applications, supporting multiple forms of interaction in cloud environments. In general, mashups manage a huge amount of heterogeneous data from different sources and handle different kinds of users. In this respect, mashup User Interfaces are becoming one of the most important pieces in many kinds of current management systems, such as for certain geographic or environmental information systems working on the Internet. In this type of systems, the user interface plays a particular role due to the huge variety of components or apps that the users need to manage at the same time. However, currently, there has been scant attention paid to the management of the user’s interaction with mashups interfaces. This goal involves the need of having important, well-constructed tools and methods conducting the data acquisition process for managing properly: (a) the interaction over the mashup user interfaces, at the front-end side; (b) the storage of the interaction in relational databases; and (c) well-supported microservices structures handled in the cloud. The fact of having valuable and flexible data acquisition processes encourages the deployment of others important issues of the interaction management, i.e., data searching, data mining, marketing, security, accessibility, usability or traceability of interaction data, among others. In this article, we present a flexible Data Acquisition System capable of capturing the human-computer interactions performed by users over mashup (User) Interfaces with the aim of storing them in a relational database. Firstly, the morphology of traditional mashup applications, their specifications and the relevant information that surrounds an interaction have been studied. Thereupon, a data acquisition system that stores user interaction on mashup based on such specifications was constructed. To achieve that purpose, an architecture of microservices was also designed in the cloud to detect, acquire, and collect the interactions performed over this kind of interfaces. The whole process is ready for acquiring internal data of the information system as well as context information and location awareness. To validate the data acquisition system, some tests on empirical case studies have been developed. Efficiency and effectiveness have also been determined by evaluating the performance of the acquisition system during different load tests. Finally, in order to ensure the software quality, a continuous integration strategy for software development and an easy management of the code have been used, facilitating the software maintenance alongside the microservice architecture, where functionalities are well encapsulated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Support for component discovery has been identified as a key challenge in various forms of composite application development. In this paper, we describe a general method for component recommendation based on structural similarity of compositions. The method dynamically ranks and recommends components as a composition is incrementally developed. Recommendations are based on structural comparison of the partial composition begin developed with a database of previously completed compositions. Using this method, we define a probabilistic graph edit distance algorithm for component recommendation. We evaluate the accuracy, catalog coverage and response time of the presented algorithm and compare it to a neighborhood-based collaborative filtering approach and two simple statistical algorithms. The evaluation is performed on a Yahoo Pipes dataset and a synthetic dataset that models more complex composite applications. The results show that the proposed algorithm is competitive with the collaborative filtering algorithm in accuracy and outperforms it significantly in coverage. The results on the synthetic dataset suggest that the presented approach can be applied successfully to other composition environments where there is regularity in how components are connected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on sociolinguistic studies of language and place and on small stories insights and methods, I put forth rescripting as a social media-enabled practice of sharing that systematically exploits visual and/or verbal manipulations of the taleworld place of already circulated stories, so as to present the new tales as parody or satire of the originals. YouTube videos such as spoofs, memes, remixes, and mashups, form typical instances of rescripting, but other verbal activities should also be recognized as part of this practice, e.g. circulars of jokes about an incident on online blogs. Using as a case study a critical moment incident related to the Greek crisis that was repeatedly shared in social media, I examine rescripting as it occurs in the intersections between story making and social media affordances, arguing that it can productively open up the current sociolinguistic focus on resemiotizations of circulated activities. I show how changes in the place of the taleworld ultimately lead to changes in emplotment on the basis of the spatial semiotic repertoires associated with the new settings. Participation frameworks are decisively shaped by these changes, as commenters mainly engage with the current tale and telling, going along with the ostensibly 'fictional’ scenarios and engaging in active storytelling, that is, creating further plots on their basis. I discuss the implications of rescripting place for the study of sharing practices and vernacular participation as well as for the study of place as constitutive of narrative plots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Mashup is now a major Web 2.0 technology because, rather than simply aggregating Web content, it combines various Web resources from other websites. Considering Web 2.0 mashups from a software engineering perspective, a visual modeling approach is crucial. Current Web 2.0 developments, however, do not support a conceptual modelling for Web 2.0 applications. This leads to inefficient development processes and a low potential for reuse. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a general-purpose modeling language that may be used in widely varying application domains. However, UML often lacks elements for modeling and representing concrete concepts of specific domains such as Web 2.0 mashup modeling. To address these shortcomings, this study proposes Web2.0MUML, a Model Driven Architecture (MDA) approach and UML profile for modeling Web 2.0 mashups. The Web2.0MUML profile extends UML by using a profile mechanism for Web 2.0 mashup modeling that presents the relevant structural properties of Web 2.0 at the conceptual level. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: 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. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Mashups that combine data from numerous web sites into an integrated experience have rapidly become state-of-the-practice way to develop new compelling applications. However, their use has been somewhat restricted, since it is common that such applications can only be run inside the browser, not in a fashion where they would be directly associated with operating system concepts. Consequently their access to the resources of the hosting system has been limited, which forms a practical obstacle for numerous applications that could benefit from e.g. context information available in mobile context. The limitations are not something that is a fundamental restriction of web technologies, but only related to the existing implementations. In this paper, we show how we have implemented a mashup desktop, where applications that download data – and even complete web applications – from the web can be used in the same way as thumbnails are commonly used. Furthermore, instead of being static, the thumbnails can be alive in a fashion that has been made popular by newer desktop systems, such as Windows 7. The implementation is based on our earlier research on composing applications using JavaScript, the Qt framework, and the K Desktop Environment, whose innovative combination has been an enabler for this work. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Digital TV (DTV) bears much potential for e-commerce, but most of it remains underexploited due to the lack of systematic approaches to the provision of interactive applications. Working on top of an existing recommender system, this paper presents mechanisms to automatically compose applications that provide personalized commercial functionalities to the users. The proposal addresses specific concerns of DTV environments, with special attention to achieving good personalization quality and furnishing useful interactions when there is no return channel permanently available for bidirectional communication. Preliminary experiments reveal good acceptance of the concept among real users. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Since the emergence of web 2.0, data started floating all over the web, through online and offline applications, and across all application domains. Web data (semi-structured data loaded through web browsers and applications communicating via internet protocols such as HTTP), in particular XML-based data, is being used for simple commercial information display (i.e., XHTML/HTML in commercial websites), instant messaging (e.g., XMPP for messaging in Whatsapp, Skype, Gtalk etc.), financial transactions (i.e., CDF3 in ecommerce), medical record processing and storage (e.g., HL7 for electronic medical records), social media (e.g., XHTML/HTML in facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus, etc.), and others. This phenomenon rendered web data manipulation (i.e., monitoring, modifying, controlling, etc.) by IT (information technology) experts, computer technicians and engineers utterly difficult seeing its exponential growth rate in volume and diversity. Not to mention the dynamicity of the data which is continuously changing on the clock and its heterogeneity (e.g., HTML/HTML5, XML, XHTML, RDF, OWL, etc.). Consequently, the manipulation of web data and in particular XML data (since XML has become one of the most essential data types used in computer communications) has shifted from the hands of computer scientists and programmers towards public computer users in all application domains. This has brought a new criterion into the web data manipulation research field, web data manipulation by non-experts. In this paper, we study and analyze existent techniques for manipulating semi-structured web data, particularly XML data, from a non-expert point of view while relating it to traditional manipulation techniques defined in the literature (i.e., filtering, adaptation, data extraction, transformation, access control, encryption, etc.). Web data manipulation techniques by non-experts were categorized under 3 major titles: (i) XML-oriented visual languages dealing with XML data extraction and transformations, (ii) Mashups tackling mainly XML restructuring with value manipulations, and (iii) Dataflow visual programming languages targeting non-expert manipulations and providing means to visually manipulate scientific data. A full analysis was conducted which allowed existent approaches/techniques to be compared and evaluated providing an overview of the current requirements on this subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]