iMashup: assisting end-user programming for the service-oriented web

Abstract

The Web is currently moving towards a platform with rich services. A notable trend is that end-users create mashups composing services with short, iterative development life cycles as well as updating with evolving needs. However, the large number of services and the high complexity of composition constraints make manual composition extremely difficult. Addressing this issue, we have developed an approach to assisting the end-users to build mashups in a simple and fast fashion. A tag-based model provides end-users a quick and intuitive insight of services. End-users simply describe their desired goals with tags. Interacting with a service repository, our approach employs a planning approach to suggest services that end-users might want to involve in the final outputs, including some additional interesting or relevant ones to induce more potential composition opportunities. End-users are allowed to iteratively modify, adjust or refine their goals. We have implemented our approach with a tool called iMashup.