Mashups Emerging Application Development Paradigm for a Digital Journal

Short Description
The WWW is currently experiencing a revolutionary growth due to its increasing participative community software applications. This paper highlights an emerging application development paradigm on the WWW, called mashup. As blogs have enabled anyone to become a publisher, mashups stimulate web development by allowing anyone to combine existing data to develop web applications. Current applications of mashups include tracking of events such as crime, hurricanes, earthquakes, meta-search integration of data and media feeds, interactive games, and as an organizer for web resources. The implications of this emerging web integration and structuring paradigm remains yet to be explored fully. This paper describes mashups from a number of angles, highlighting current developments while providing sufficient illustrations to indicate its potential implications. It also highlights the role of mashups in complementing and enhancing digital journals by providing insights into the quality academic content, extent of coverage, and the enabling of expanded services. We present pioneering initiatives for the Journal of Universal Computer Science in our efforts to harness the collective intelligence of a collaborative scholarly network.

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Content
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The term Web 2.0, was coined by Tim O´Reilly [O´Reilly, 2005] to describe the revolutionary growth of the WWW which has now become a powerful platform for social networking. OhmyNews highlights the social engineering power of Web 2.0 with its notion of “news by the people for the people” by engaging over 41,000 “citizen journalists”. [OhmyNews, 2006] The web thus incorporates a radical networked decentralisation to stimulate content creation and exchange by the masses. A new social computing platform has emerged supporting the extensive growth of e-communities built around social software applications such as Podcasting and Wikis. Podcasting facilitates the compilation, valuation and sharing of large amounts of media objects across the network by millions of users. The expanding role and influence of such services is thus effectively transforming e-communities. [Maurer and Schinagl, 2006]. Wikipedia, [Wikipedia, 2006] an encyclopedia that anyone can edit, has now more than 1.3 million collaboratively developed articles in English language.
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A mashup [Wikipedia, Mashup, 2006] is a website or web application that seamlessly combines content from one or more sources into an integrated experience. Content used in a mashup is typically provided by a public interface made available by a third party. Unlike Blogs and Wikis which are purely content population engines, mashups provide an added dimension by incorporating facilities for user-driven design and development of new applications. Mashups stimulate web development by allowing anyone to combine existing data from sources like eBay, Amazon, Google, Windows Live and Yahoo in innovative ways and therefore support a structuring capability for the integration of web content and applications. Asynchronous JAvascript over XML (AJAX) has made the Web interface appropriate for the development of applications such as mashups, as it allows requests to the server to be performed asynchronously. Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, provides a means of transferring micro-contents (snippets of content) between users, web sites and servers. These web feeds provide streams of inputs for mashups to be integrated into a unified environment.
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