End-user programming of mashups with vegemite

ABSTRACT

Mashups are an increasingly popular way to integrate data from multiple web sites to fit a particular need, but it often requires substantial technical expertise to create them. To lower the barrier for creating mashups, we have extended the CoScripter web automation tool with a spreadsheet-like environment called Vegemite. Our system uses direct-manipulation and programming-by-demonstration tech-niques to automatically populate tables with information collected from various web sites. A particular strength of our approach is its ability to augment a data set with new values computed by a web site, such as determining the driving distance from a particular location to each of the addresses in a data set. An informal user study suggests that Vegemite may enable a wider class of users to address their information needs.

REFERENCES

• 1: Jeffrey P. Bigham , Anna C. Cavender , Ryan S. Kaminsky , Craig M. Prince , Tyler S. Robison, Transcendence: enabling a personal view of the deep web, Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces, January 13-16, 2008, Gran Canaria, Spain [doi>10.1145/1378773.1378796]
• 2: Allen Cypher, Eager: programming repetitive tasks by demonstration, Watch what I do: programming by demonstration, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1993
• 3: Mira Dontcheva , Steven M. Drucker , David Salesin , Michael F. Cohen, Relations, cards, and search templates: user-guided web data integration and layout, Proceedings of the 20th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, October 07-10, 2007, Newport, Rhode Island, USA [doi>10.1145/1294211.1294224]
• 4: Mira Dontcheva , Steven M. Drucker , Geraldine Wade , David Salesin , Michael F. Cohen, Summarizing personal web browsing sessions, Proceedings of the 19th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, October 15-18, 2006, Montreux, Switzerland [doi>10.1145/1166253.1166273]
• 5: Rob Ennals , David Gay, User-friendly functional programming for web mashups, Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming, October 01-03, 2007, Freiburg, Germany
• 6: Alexander Faaborg , Henry Lieberman, A goal-oriented web browser, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in computing systems, April 22-27, 2006, Montréal, Québec, Canada [doi>10.1145/1124772.1124883]
• 7: Jun Fujima , Aran Lunzer , Kasper Hornbæk , Yuzuru Tanaka, Clip, connect, clone: combining application elements to build custom interfaces for information access, Proceedings of the 17th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, October 24-27, 2004, Santa Fe, NM, USA [doi>10.1145/1029632.1029664]
• 8: Darris Hupp , Robert C. Miller, Smart bookmarks: automatic retroactive macro recording on the web, Proceedings of the 20th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, October 07-10, 2007, Newport, Rhode Island, USA [doi>10.1145/1294211.1294226]
• 9: Huynh, D., S. Mazzocchi, and D. Karger. Piggy Bank: Experience the Semantic Web Inside Your Web Browser. In Proc. ISWC 2005. Springer (2005), 413--430.
• 10: David F. Huynh , Robert C. Miller , David R. Karger, Enabling web browsers to augment web sites' filtering and sorting functionalities, Proceedings of the 19th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, October 15-18, 2006, Montreux, Switzerland [doi>10.1145/1166253.1166274]
• 11: Huynh, D., R.C. Miller, and D. Karger. Potluck: Data Mash-Up Tool for Casual Users. In Proc. ISWC 2007. Springer (2007), 239--252.
• 12: IBM, IBM Lotus Mashups. http://www.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/mashups/
• 13: Eser Kandogan , Eben Haber , Rob Barrett , Allen Cypher , Paul Maglio , Haixia Zhao, A1: end-user programming for web-based system administration, Proceedings of the 18th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, October 23-26, 2005, Seattle, WA, USA [doi>10.1145/1095034.1095070]
• 14: Greg Little , Tessa A. Lau , Allen Cypher , James Lin , Eben M. Haber , Eser Kandogan, Koala: capture, share, automate, personalize business processes on the web, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, April 28-May 03, 2007, San Jose, California, USA [doi>10.1145/1240624.1240767]
• 15: Microformats. http://microformats.org/
• 16: Microsoft, Microsoft Popfly. http://www.popfly.com/
• 17: Christopher Scaffidi , Brad Myers , Mary Shaw, Topes: reusable abstractions for validating data, Proceedings of the 30th international conference on Software engineering, May 10-18, 2008, Leipzig, Germany [doi>10.1145/1368088.1368090]
• 18: Solvent. http://simile.mit.edu/wiki/Solvent
• 19: Rattapoom Tuchinda , Pedro Szekely , Craig A. Knoblock, Building data integration queries by demonstration, Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces, January 28-31, 2007, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA [doi>10.1145/1216295.1216328]
• 20: Fernanda B. Viegas , Martin Wattenberg , Frank van Ham , Jesse Kriss , Matt McKeon, ManyEyes: a Site for Visualization at Internet Scale, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, v.13 n.6, p.1121-1128, November 2007 [doi>10.1109/TVCG.2007.70577]
• 21: Jeffrey Wong , Jason I. Hong, Making mashups with marmite: towards end-user programming for the web, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, April 28-May 03, 2007, San Jose, California, USA [doi>10.1145/1240624.1240842]
• 22: Yahoo!, Pipes. http://pipes.yahoo.com/

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.m Miscellaneous

General Terms:
Design

Keywords:
automation, data integration, end-user programming, mashup, programming by demonstration, web