Web-Wide Application Customization

Abstract

Mashups have become popular in recent years in the context of Web 2.0 developments. They represent a way of allowing an application to grow beyond the capabilities of its original developers through an incorporation of external functionality. This paper first introduces several approaches to integrating mashups into the Web pages or services, which commonly implement ways to determine which mashups are potentially relevant for display in a certain Web page context. It then describes in detail a novel approach called ActiveTags, which enables users to create reliable mashups based on tags and hence customized views of Web pages with tagged content. A scenario that demonstrates the potential benefits of this approach is presented. Moreover, a formalization is presented which suitably combines previous work on modeling the Web with relational meta-programming, thereby showing that ActiveTags (as well as related approaches) can conceptually be described in terms of the relational model of data.