On the systematic development of domain-specific mashup tools for end users

The recent emergence of mashup tools has refueled research on end user development, i.e., on enabling end-users without programming skills to compose their own applications. Yet, similar to what happened with analogous promises in web service composition and business process management, research has mostly focused on technology and, as a consequence, has failed its objective. In this paper, we propose a domain-specific approach to mashups that is aware of the terminology, concepts, rules, and conventions (the domain) the user is comfortable with. We show what developing a domain-specific mashup tool means, which role the mashup meta-model and the domain model play and how these can be merged into a domain-specific mashup meta-model. We exemplify the approach by implementing a mashup tool for a specific domain (research evaluation) and describe the respective user study. The results of the user study confirm that domain-specific mashup tools indeed lower the entry barrier to mashup development. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.