Towards Semantic Mashups: Tools, Methodologies, and State of the Art

Semantic Mashups constitute a relatively new genre of applications that illustrate the combination of the current trends of the Web, i.e. the Semantic Web and Web 2.0. The great benefit of Semantic mashups lies in the ability to aggregate different and heterogeneous data with rich semantic annotations and due to this, an additional ease of integration. In this paper, the authors attempt to outline the transition from conventional to semantic mashups, analyzing the former's limitations and identifying improvements and contributions which can come in with the advent of the later. Furthermore, the authors survey the background technologies on which semantic mashups are based, like Semantic Web Services and the process of data triplification. The authors also investigate the current trends and efforts put into developing tools and frameworks, which are designed to support users with little programming knowledge in semantic mashup application development, such as Semantic Pipes or Jigs4OWL. After presenting and illustrating the theoretical and technological background of this genre of mashups, the authors look into some use cases and systems. Among others, the authors present their mashup, called Books@HPClab, in which they introduce a personalized semantic service for mashing up information from different on-line bookstores.