Call for Papers

6th International Workshop on Web APIs and Service Mashups (Mashups 2012)

Associated with the European Conference on Service-Oriented and Cloud Computing (ESOCC) 2012
Bertinoro, Italy, 19 September 2012

Services computing and Web 2.0 are converging into a programmable Web today. The interaction and integration of services computing and Web 2.0 technologies, however, exposes various complexities that have to be faced. This workshop looks specifically at Services Mashups – end-user-oriented compositions of Web APIs, Web content and Web data sources.

BACKGROUND

The continuous proliferation of many Web APIs together with the social changes that are taking place in the last years are contributing to turn the Web into a programmable Web. An interesting consequence of this programmable feature is that it empowers end-user to build new data and services from the combination of resources that are available in the Web providing a higher-level value than the original exposed APIs.

A classical example of a Mashup consists in combining mapping APIs (e.g., Google Maps) and Atom data APIs (e.g. from New York Times) to provide a new service that displays listing on the map. The resulting Web applications, or mashups, add a new value to the combined Web APIs that was not initially conceived for them individually.

While mashups have taken off and 1000s of them are currently available for various purposes, there still remain various challenges and opportunities that, if properly addressed, would make mashup development more feasible and popular. Some of the main challenges are:

  1. Devising programming models (languages, frameworks, platforms) for the composition of Web-accessible services and data of all kinds and architectural styles (REST, Atom, RSS, AtomPub, and SOAP/WSDL) and development of integrated user-interfaces.
  2. Ensuring quality of service for mashups, including performance, reliability, and security.
  3. Understanding social and economic factors in the creation, acceptance, and sustainability of services mashups, including software-as-services markets, services marketplaces and intermediaries, digital communities, and pricing, incentive and contracting models.
  4. Integrating mashups into social computing platforms, such as Facebook and OpenSocial-enabled social networks, which provide a huge user base with profiles and social graphs data.
  5. Scaling mashups, e.g., taking advantage of the cloud computing infrastructure.
  6. Providing the necessary primitives to secure resulting data from mashups and also ensure privacy of the original data and APIs.
  7. Simplifying platforms and tools to a point that mashups could be generated by end-users with minimal efforts.
  8. Enabling mashups for mobile platforms, such as smartphones, which also expose interesting new kind of information such as location and profile data.

In this sixth edition of the Mashups Workshop we will solicit contributions addressing these issues and aim to bring together several relevant communities from academia and industry working on a) mashup-based applications, b) generic and domain-specific mashup tools, platforms and infrastructure, c) cross-cutting concerns of software service engineering and d) related topics from areas like social networking or economics.

We plan to continue the tradition of the previous Mashups workshops (2007 in Vienna, 2008 in Sydney, 2009 in Orlando, 2010 in Cyprus, 2011 in Lugano), not only selecting a broad range of papers in the space but also getting keynote speakers from leading industry groups that are currently offering mashup tools and platforms for wide-consumptions and availability.

Contributors are invited to submit original research papers addressing relevant aspects of mashup applications, technologies and engineering. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following:

  • Languages, frameworks, and platforms for the design, implementation, testing and maintenance of services mashups, including dynamic languages and frameworks.
  • New approaches to mashup construction: data flow-, document-, spreadsheet- and process-oriented mashups, end-user mashup development, mashups in the cloud.
  • Novel applications of mashups, e.g., mobile, location-aware or wiki-based.
  • Specific service mashup application and technology examples with respect to design, architecture, implementation, usability and user-experience.
  • Mashups within social software platforms, e.g., OpenSocial or Facebook.
  • Mashups within and across enterprises.
  • Quality of service and mashups: performance, reliability, security privacy or other non-functional aspects.
  • Analysis of and experience with services mashups (creation, deployment, and usage) from social and economic perspectives; services markets and marketplaces, digital communities, pricing and contracting models.
  • Experience reports on short-term and long-term maintenance and evolution of mashups.


IMPORTANT DATES

  • Submission Deadline: July 19, 2012 August 02 2012
  • Notification Due: August 14, 2012
  • Final Version Due: August 31, 2012
  • Mashups 2012 Workshop Date: September 19, 2012


SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS

Authors are invited to submit original, previously unpublished research papers. Two kinds of contributions are sought: short position papers (not to exceed 4 pages) describing particular challenges or experiences relevant to the scope of the workshop, and full research papers (not to exceed 8 pages) describing novel solutions to relevant problems. Papers need to comply to ACM style format (http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates) and are to be submitted electronically in PDF format via EasyChair at http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mashups2012

All submissions will be peer-reviewed by members of the international program committee. Paper acceptance will be based on originality, significance, technical soundness, and clarity of presentation. Accepted papers will be included in the workshop proceedings, and circulated to participants prior to the event. Accepted workshop papers will be published as part of the ACM Digital Library.

At least one author of an accepted paper must register and participate in the workshop. Registration is subject to the terms, conditions and procedure of the main ESOCC conference to be found on their Web site at http://esocc2012.cs.unibo.it/

CONTACT

If you have further queries please email the workshop chairs on: mashups2012∂easychair.org