Towards a More Effective Mashup Using Mashable Service Model

Web is becoming a programmable platform and Mashup is emerging as a brand-new service composition paradigm. However, one of the biggest blocking issues with the universal adoption of Mashup is lack of a well-designed inventory of mashable services for users to create mashups effectively. In this paper, we propose a novel and practical method to conceptualize, model and design the mashable services in a specific domain. Firstly, through analyzing current mashups theoretically, we present a conceptual model of mashable service, which describes not only a service, but also the relationships with other services. As a result, the services and their relationships in a domain can be formalized as a directed graph, in which vertex represent services and edges represent relationships. Furthermore, a mashup can be modeled as one of its sub-graph. Secondly, we present a novel and practical method to identify and design the inventory of mashable services through mapping the well-known Entity-Relationship Model to mashable service model. The inventory of mashable services enables business users to create mashups for their situational problems effectively. Finally, the proposed method is applied to a real-world domain to show the feasibility and effectiveness.