Workshop Rationale and Aims

In the context of the Web, the word “mashup” is used to denote Web applications that are materialized by integrating data, services and/or presentation of other (data) sources or applications. Some applications focus on integrating RSS feeds, others on integrating RESTful services or SOAP services, others on Atom feeds, and there are those that focus on integrating user interfaces. We believe mashups – and especially mashup tools with their models, languages and instruments for mashup development – do bring innovation, in that they tackle integration at the user interface level (most mashups do integrate presentation content, not “just” data), they aim at simplicity more than completeness of features (up to the point that advanced Web users, not only programmers, can develop composite applications), and they allow fairly sophisticated development tasks in the web browser.

Over the last years, we have seen many efforts invested in research on mashups, in both the industrial and the academic context, yet we are still far from a common understanding of the problems that drive the research, of the approaches that best fit given problems, and even of the benefits of the results achieved so far.

In light of these considerations, the goal of ComposableWeb is to stimulate the discussion of key issues, approaches, open problems, innovative applications, and trends in the area of web mashups and lightweight composition on the Web, so as to accelerate progress. ComposableWeb aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners with different research interests and belonging to communities like Web Engineering, Service Engineering, Business Process Management, Databases, Semantic Web, Software Composition and Software Engineering.