A Spreadsheet-like Construct for Streamlining and Reusing Mashups

It is challenging to provide end users an easy-to-use problem-solving tool to combine data from different sources and reuse the results. Inspired by spreadsheets, we argue that spreadsheet-like programming paradigm can help to reduce the complexity and to improve user experience in building mashups. In this paper, we propose a spreadsheet-like construct as the basis of this mashup building paradigm. The construct includes a data model, a "nested table" view structure and a set of carefully chosen mashup operators. Data from a variety of sources is structured like a spreadsheet, and end-users are not necessarily aware of the underlining data flow. SpiderCharlotte, a tool to help end users to build situational applications for their daily uses, was developed to demonstrate the characteristics of this construct.