Configuration approach for personalized travel mashup

Abstract

AbstractNowadays, we live in an interconnected ecosystem of heterogeneous services which are available anytime and anywhere. Although these services can be used individually, their combined usage provides end‐users with real added value. Nevertheless, existing mashup solutions are not fully targeted to end‐users. Indeed, these solutions require technical knowledge to deal with the technological heterogeneity in which they are offered. The key limitation of current mashup solutions is their general‐purpose nature, which privileges expressive power over intuitiveness. As the reason for mashups was the desire of end‐users to build applications responding to their situational needs, we propose a domain‐specific mashup approach that “speaks the language of the user.” The article presents (1) a domain‐specific visual language that allows end‐users to easily build mashup‐based compositions, (2) a mashup schema which is a gateway between service implementations and end‐users, providing a high‐level description in order to hide technological issues when including services in composition; and (3) a configuration module that executes the travel mashup query and generates a personalized trip planning. The results of a user study confirm that domain‐specific mashup tools lower the entry barrier to mashup development.