End-User Development of Mashups with NaturalMash

Context: The emergence of the long-tail in the market of software applications is shifting the role of end-users from mere consumers to becoming developers of applications addressing their unique, personal, and transient needs. On the Web, a popular form of such applications is called mashup, built out of the lightweight composition of Web APIs (reusable software components delivered as a service through the Web). To enable end-users to build mashups, there is a key problem that must be overcome: End-users lack programming knowledge as well as the interest to learn how to master the complex set of Web technologies required to develop mashups. End-User Development (EUD) is an emerging research field dealing with this type of problems. Its main goal is to design tools and techniques facilitating the development of software applications by non-programmers.Objective: The paper describes the design and evaluation of NaturalMash, an innovative EUD tool for mashups (a mashup tool). NaturalMash aims at enabling non-professional users without any knowledge of programming languages and skills to create feature-rich, interactive, and useful mashups.Methods: The design of NaturalMash adopts a formative evaluation approach, and has completed three design and evaluation iterations. The formative evaluations utilize usability testing, think aloud protocol, questionnaires, observation, and unstructured interviews. Additionally, we compare the expressive power of naturalmash with the state-of-the-art mashup tools.Results: The results from the formative evaluations helped us identify important usability problems. From an assessment point of view, the results were promising and sggested that the proposed tool has a short and gentle learning curve in a way that even non-programmers are able to rapidly build useful mashups. Also, the comparative evaluation results showed that NaturalMash offers a competitive level of expressive power compared with existing mashup tools targeting non-programmers.Conclusion: As the evaluation results indicate, NaturalMash provides a high level of expressive power while it is still highly usable by non-programmers. These suggest that we have successfully achieved the objective of the proposed tool, distinguishing it from existing mashup tools that are either too limited or highly specialized for non-professional users.     

基于地图Mashup的水质实时监测系统软件开发

该文介绍了基于地图Mashup的水质实时监测系统的设计,实现了对监测站点各项数据的查询和报表输出,与现场视频信号动态连接进行直观监测,并且能够对监测站信息进行设置,同时系统设计兼顾了良好的用户界面交互性。     

基于Mashup的用户自定义空间态势可视化表达

当前空间态势可视化方案不能根据快速变化的数据和任务要求实现用户自定义表达。在Web应用领域,Mashup能够将多个不同来源的支持Web API的应用按照一定的模式进行糅合,产生新的Web应用,并利用从外部数据源检索到的内容来创建全新的服务。基于Mashup技术,设计用户自定义的空间态势可视化表达,实现内部Widget之间的数据交互;实现三维和二维态势信息可视化Widget,并能够同步显示空间态势信息;通过网络图层管理进行态势信息的显示管理,实现事件的订阅与发布。实验结果表明,基于Mashup技术的用户自定义空间态势可视化表达能够适应快速变化的任务和数据需求。     

Gneiss: spreadsheet programming using structured web service data

Web services offer a more reliable and efficient way to access online data than scraping web pages. However, interacting with web services to retrieve data often requires people to write a lot of code. Moreover, many web services return data in complex hierarchical structures that make it difficult for people to perform any further data manipulation. We developed Gneiss, a tool that extends the familiar spreadsheet metaphor to support using structured web service data. Gneiss lets users retrieve or stream arbitrary JSON data returned from web services to a spreadsheet using interaction techniques without writing any code. It introduces a novel visualization that represents hierarchies in data using nested spreadsheet cells and allows users to easily reshape and regroup the extracted structured data. Data flow is two-way between the spreadsheet and the web services, enabling people to easily make a new web service call and retrieve new data by modifying spreadsheet cells. We report results form a user study that showed that Gneiss helped spreadsheet users use and analyze structured data more efficiently than Excel and even outperform professional programmers writing code. We further use a set of examples to demonstrate our tool's ability to create reusable data extraction and manipulation programs that work with complex web service data.     

云计算环境下基于Mashup的一种电信网络能力服务提供模式

随着高速发展的互联网和移动通信在业务层面的逐渐融合,国内运营商所采用的"封闭花园"模式的业务架构已经面临各种挑战,因此需要更多地考虑如何有效引入互联网业务和服务模式,不断提升用户体验。在电信运营商逐步开放其电信能力API的背景下,基于Mashup的业务构建模式,提出了一种云计算环境下的电信网络能力服务提供模式。该模式将Mashup的理念移植到电信能力上,并将电信能力封装成Web Element的形式呈现给用户,进一步提升了电信网络能力服务的抽象层次。这种电信能力应用模式打破了电信能力拘泥于手持终端的传统形式,提出了一种新的适合于Web2.0环境的电信网络能力服务提供模式。在"OMP(Open Mobile Internet Platform)应用运行和开发引擎算法及功能研发"项目中的试用证明了其可行性。     

基于移动Widget的Web NGN业务融合架构

提出了一种基于移动Widget业务平台的Web与NGN业务融合架构及业务开发模式,能够基于Web技术,充分利用当前Web2.0丰富的内容资源和业务能力,NGN网络的电信网络能力以及新型移动终端的业务能力,进行新的业务开发,从而使得Web NGN融合业务的业务种类更加丰富,并可以发挥终端能力,充分利用移动性来开发新业务。本文通过列举业务案例,对上述业务融合架构进行了验证与评估,并对Web NGN业务融合的未来进行了展望。     

基于Mashup的移动互联网业务架构研究

目前,移动互联网迅猛发展,Mashup作为构建未来移动互联网业务架构的关键技术之一引起了广泛关注。文章在对传统互联网Mashup业务研究的基础上,介绍了未来基于Mashup的移动互联网业务架构,并对其产生背景、关键问题、业务模式以及产业链等进行了分析。     

电信网中基于Mashup的自助服务应用平台

近年来互联网Mashup的流行引起了电信业的广泛关注,移动终端厂商和电信运营商都在积极尝试将Mashup思想引入到电信领域,以利用网络中丰富的资源产生新颖的电信应用。文章在这一方向上进行了探索并设计了一种基于Mashup的自助服务应用平台,使得用户可以在此平台上按照自己的想法设计出个性化应用并为自己服务。此外,该平台通过对资源进行管理,解决了互联网Mashup数据源不可靠的问题,也为用户计费、鉴权认证等业务运营环境提供了支持。     

一种基于“封装源”的Mashup体系结构研究

为改进Mashup原体系结构的不完善之处,采用以"封装源"为核心的五层框架改进Mashup体系结构,在Mashup体系结构规范管理等方面提供解决方案,从而规范Mashup体系结构中出现的"知识产权侵权"、"数据污染"等问题。