An Evolutionary Algorithm for Automatic Composition of Information-gathering Web Services in Mashups

The idea behind mashups is to provide a mechanism that allows for more or less spontaneous combination of existing Web applications. Users shall thus be enabled to combine data and services according to their needs.However, existing mashup frameworks require some programming knowledge, hence are not suitable for non-expert users. In this paper, we present a system that builds on existing semantic Web research to achieve an automatic, ad-hoc generation of mashups thus eliminating the need for programmer involvement. At the core of our approach, there is an evolutionary algorithm that automatically composes different information Web services based on semantic service descriptions. The information that has been retrieved from the invoked Web services is automatically transformed into a semantic representation and presented as a mashup to the users of the system.