Process-Oriented Enterprise Mashups.

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Process-oriented Enterprise Mashups
Paul de Vrieze∗, Lai Xu∗, Athman Bouguettaya†, Jian Yang‡and Jinjun Chen§
∗SAP Research Switzerland
St. Gallen, Switzerland
Email: {pdevrieze, laixu}@acm.org
†CSIRO ICT Centre
Canberra, ACT, Australia
Email: athman.bouguettaya@csiro.au
‡Department of Computing
Macquarie University
Sydney, NSW, Australia
Email: jian@comp.mq.edu.au
§Faculty of Information & Communication Technologies
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Victoria 3122, Australia
Email: jchen@swin.edu.au
Abstract
Mashups, a new web 2.0 technology provide the ability for
easy creation of web-based applications by end-users. The
uses of the mashups are often consumer related. In this paper
we explore how mashups can be used in the enterprise area
and hat the criteria for enterprise mashups are. We provide
categories for the classification of enterprise mashups, and
based upon a motivating example we go further in depth on
business process enterprise mashups.
1. Introduction
Being not only useful for integrating legacy systems and
permitting the separation of concerns by founding the basic
building blocks of functionality, service-oriented paradigm
provides a new way of designing distributed system that
encompasses its own design principles, design pattern cata-
logs, pattern languages, a distinct architectural model, and a
set of associated technologies and frameworks [1]. Service-
orientation provides a way of thinking of business process
management (BPM) in terms of computational infrastruc-
tures, services, service-based development and outcomes of
those services.
The service-oriented architecture (SOA) paradigm spec-
ifies a set of loosely coupled services whose interfaces
are published, discovered and invoked over the Internet
along with their interactions. It promises a more flexible
IT infrastructure that is able to react to business changes
more quickly than before. SOA aims to enhance efficiency,
agility, flexibility and productivity by positioning services
as the primary atomic functional elements. Despite of its
benefits, very few companies actually offer their (internal)
services to others at the moment. However, this situation is
changing. Companies such as Amazon, Google, Yahoo and
eBay are exposing their IT services over the Web. Their
customers can integrate these services in order to build new
applications in a “mashup” fashion.
Web services have been proven very popular in industry.
It has become a layer of abstraction over legacy hardware
and software platforms. A Web service is an interface
that describes a collection of operations that are network-
accessible through standardized Web protocols, and whose
features are described using a standard XML-based language
[2].
Widgets are small, simple applications that allow the user
to perform common tasks or monitor important information.
It allows the user to monitor or interact with an application
without needing to launch the full application. Widgets
are designed to use XML and a scripting language (ie.
javascript) to enable developers to build small, simple, down-
loadable applications that can monitor information about the
user’s computer, or Internet-based items of interest like the
weather, stock prices,etc. Widgets typically run on a run-
time engine, such as the Yahoo! Widget Engine, Microsoft’s
Windows Vista gadget engine, or dashboard widgets of
Apple Macintosh.
Web 2.0 has gained increasing interest and attention, and
led to development and evolution of Web culture communi-
ties and hosted services. Web 2.0 technologies have further
simplified user contributions and released the power of
cooperation with efforts. Web 2.0 has popularized concepts
such as mashups and syndication though technologies such
as RSS, Atom. They provide new means and possibili-
ties for business networking and business flexibility. Web
2.0 facilitates rich user experience and user participation.

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User participation implies openness, freedom and collective
intelligence. Web 2.0 also supports dynamic content and
metadata. Web standards and scalability are further provided
by Web 2.0 [3].
On-line mashups nowadays have evidently captured in-
terest and continue to grow in popularity. They have the
capability to combine data/information with an application
to create and produce conclusive and useful output. The term
“mashup” implies easy, fast integration, frequently made
possible by by access to open APIs and data sources to
produce results data owners had no idea could be pro-
duced. Mashups are data aggregation applications, com-
bining data from different sources to create valuable in-
formation. Mashup users use, loosely defined “Web 2.0”
techniques to effect these results. Mashup applications can
be built using different widgets, open APIs, web services,
and data sources.
We have seen many examples of lightweight integration
(mashups, gadgets and pipes), from the time-honored stock
ticker, to e-commerce sites that combine UPS or FedEx
tracking data with an order history to present a single
view of order status. Inside the enterprise, portal server
vendors, including IBM and Plumtree, have long offered
users graphical tools to integrate data sources, resulting in
simple, personalized Web applications.
There are also mashups using Web traffic and other
analytics data to create visual reports for customers. Or
mashups to give employees access to the repair, order, and
service history for any part, integrating a half-dozen data
sources. In the case of real-estate agents mashups can also
be used to integrate client data from the CRM system within
agents’ e-mail, allowing them to view reports of current
property matches from e-mail alerts. Although attractive for
lightweight, rapidly developed applications, current mashups
also have limitations such as a very strong focus on data
integration. At least, mashups currently make sense for 80
percent of noncritical IT processes and logic, no company
would rely on mashups for critical information.
From all above examples of mashups, we can see that
today’s mashups are primarily focused on data integration
instead of creating processes. Enterprise mashups on the
other hand have different usage and types. We see four types
of enterprise mashups:
1) Business process mashups, which coordinate different
process orchestration events.
Business process mashups allow a user to automate
his tasks. When a user needs to perform a task this
often involves getting information from one place,
aggregating, filtering, and shaping it, and then sending
the result to a different place, and then again until
some time when the process is finished.
When performing a purchase this for example ends up
into: requesting quotes from a number of suppliers.
When each quote comes in, verify that it satisfies
price and product conditions. When not enough good
quotes are received after a period of time, request more
quotes from different suppliers. When enough quotes
are received, providing the three best quotes to the
decision maker, who selects one. Order the product
from the selected supplier, and finally when the invoice
arrives, verify the costs with the quote, and pay the
supplier.
Many of these steps can be automated relatively sim-
ple, such that those elements which do not require
human intervention by the user can be done auto-
matically, or, if wanted, with the click of a single
button. A business process mashup allows the user to
specify this execution himself, and it will be executed
as if he performed the tasks manually. This approach
is different from traditional workflow management
approaches in that the mashup is focussed on a single
user/role, and the actions are performed like they
would if they were done manually. These process
mashups further live at a lower level in the process,
more focussed on concrete tasks than abstract tasks
that must be decomposed into other, more detailed
tasks.
2) Front-end mashups, which are typically done by tech-
nical leads in lines of business and include information
embedded in the page and visualization of related
data sources. Some examples of front-end mashups
are ones that overlay sales data on a map and pair
inventory data with customer orders.
Front-end mashups are primarilly visualisation tools.
They perform business intelligence tasks by retrieving
data from various sources, processing this, and finally
visuallising the results. These mashups allow users
to build their own tools for monitoring the business
process, or to get precise insight in particular parts
of the business. As the need for information changes
fast, the specific value is often not clear, and the
information can often be gotten in different ways
(such as spreadsheets) as well, the roundtrip to a
development department is often a too big barrier for
visualisation tools to be developed when not done by
the end-user.
3) User interface mashups. These mashups function as
user interfaces for data entry. Many of the tasks in a
business process actually require the entry, editing, or
approval of data. When the type of the data is known,
appropriate entry controls can easilly be generated,
where the user creates the widget to place the controls
in a convenient way, or to select alternative controls
that have added value. An example of such a control
would be a control that would show the picture of
products. In a mashup for customer support, it might
be valuable to match a product number to this picture
to allow the representative a clearer understanding of

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the product which has the issue.
4) Knowledgemashups.
mashups that are used to open up the knowledge that
exists within an enterprise. A continuous problem
within large enterprises is the management of
knowledge. People in one department often don’t
know what members of other departments do.
Knowledge mashups incorporate social features that
allow different users to collaborate on opening up
knowledge sources.
When thinking about knowledge mashup, think about
tools that identify what people with similar roles
access within the various knowledge bases within the
company. Or maybe what contacts from related de-
partments look at. Other applications of these mashups
would help with data synchronization between various
parts of the enterprise information system landscape.
Knowledgemashups are
In this paper, we focus on the second type of enterprise
mashups – business process mashups. These business pro-
cess mashups can coordinate different process orchestrations
and support process-oriented enterprise situations. By lower-
ing the barriers to business process management, they have
a high potential to be of significant business value for small
and mid-size enterprises.
• Relations between mashup and Web service composi-
tion.
Mashups have a broader range of functionality than web
service compositions. Composing services is only a part
of what mashups do. For example service compositions
do not have an independent instantiation. They are
initiated by calling the composed service. Mashups on
the other hand, especially business process mashups,
can have active parts that can monitor the environment
or be notified of events.
Mashups, being broader in scope than web service com-
positions, actually differ most in the area of approach.
A mashup is the result of fast development on a small
scale. In the unix world, scripts are used for various
tasks within the system, and for administration. These
tasks can be performed by complete programs, but for
many tasks, scripts are more suitable and convenient.
Mashups can be compared with scripts, where web
service compositions are programs. The capabilities
(looking only at web service mashups) are similar, but
the strengths of the approaches are in different areas.
Currently there are already many interesting Web 2.0
services and applications, but only in the data integra-
tion level [4]. The idea for a business process mashup
is to provide process integration to these services and
applications.
• Relation between business process mashup and tradi-
tional workflow systems.
The relation between business process mashups and
traditional workflow systems is also clear. Traditional
workflow systems provide user a stable system more
reflect to routine. Business process mashup can be
complement of a traditional workflow system. Because
of agile ability, a business process mashup can reflect
to change better, changes of user requirements, changes
of process related resources, etc. It should be cheaper
and easier to use. Because of the use of Internet as
the application basis, it may also includes accessibility
problems, security problems and so on. Business pro-
cess mashups are on the very beginning of their journey,
and have a long way to go.
1.1. Related work
Current mashups, such as Google Mashup Editor [5] and
Yahoo Pipes [6], are mainly data-driven Web applications
which mainly focuse on seamless end user programming
without requiring any programming experience from the end
users [7], [4]. Swasup provides a domain-specific language
(DSL) for creating mashups [8]. The DSL is implement
in Ruby on Rails and provides concepts that let users
efficiently creat mashup: multiprotocol service and data
access, mediation support, and a means for generating a UI
for the resulting mashup [9]. F.Curbera and his colleagues
present another mashup tool Bite, a lightweight composition
support acting as a foundation for implementing workflows
that can integrate UI on top of it [10] [11]. The business
process mashup we propose is even more traditional like
workflow systems, but much more agile.
In this paper we will discuss what further needs to be
added to extend the current data mashups to become business
process mashups. We first look at a motivating example for
process-oriented enterprise mashups, its models and avail-
able Web services, feeds, widgets, gadgets, pipes, mashups,
and APIs. We analyze the characteristics of process-oriented
enterprise mashups in Section 3. Key issues of process-
oriented enterprise mashups will be discussed in Section 4.
The paper ends with a conclusive summary.
2. Motivating example: international moving
services
Building a virtual enterprise (VE) for international moving
services (IMS) presents some possibilities of building enter-
prise services from existing Web services, widgets, feeds,
and other APIs. An international moving service aims to
facilitate international relocations in various ways. These
services go beyond moving items, but can include things
such as visa applications and assistance in finding a new
residence. In brief, the goal of international moving services
starts with helping customers to find moving companies
and request quotes. A very brief, incomplete and abstract

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description of the various services offered by an international
moving service would include:
• Find Moving Companies: compare the services of in-
ternational movers by requesting free quotes for the
customer, provide moving tips, and information docu-
ments needed for international moving such as official
government Customs, visa and immigration, health,
weather, etc.
• Travel Arrangements: find cheapest tickets and/or car
renting in both places of departure and destination if
needed.
• Temporary Stay Arrangement: find hotels or holi-
day/service apartments in both departure and destina-
tion if needed.
• Home Search: pre-select properties according to client
requirements such as proximity to a childcare center
and provide neighborhood guide which contains infor-
mation on doctors, shopping, schools, leisure activities
etc.
• School/childcare Search: provide explanation of the
local education system, options including public, pri-
vate and international schools, provide information on
pre-school options including nurseries, toddler groups
and other childcare facilities, provide list of possible
schools, childcare or other facilities relating to the home
search are.
• Settling-in Services: advise on banking systems, pro-
vide information on insurance of health, home, car etc.,
and advise on importing a car into the destination if
applicable.
• Leaving Assistance: arrange property hand-back or
sale, close utility accounts and arrange final bills, and
manage property if client leaves before end of tenancy.
Being a VE-IMS, the payment, CRM, and bookkeeping
functions that should be included for being a normal business
are sourced from third parties. However, we only concentrate
here on the VE’s core business processes. General business
related processes are not discussed here.
Because of the various requirements from its customers,
the services provided by a VE-IMS are dependent on the
particular situation of its customers. Different customers
require a different process. This process is supported by a
special-purpose piece of software, which we call a enterprise
service mashup, with particular services, processes or activi-
ties. In addition to added capability, new service mashup can
modify, enhance, customize or extend an existing service
mashup, or include and combine parts or components (or
both) from multiple existing service mashups.
A very preliminary service of the VE-IMS is to help
customers to find a moving company for shipping their
household effects to the new place of residence. First, the
VE-IMS will request free quotes from moving companies
according to the customer’s place of departure and desti-
Find Moving
Companies
Travel
Arrangement
Temporary Stay
Arrangement
Home
Search
School/
childcare
Search
Leaving
Assistance
Settling-in
Services
Figure 1. Meta Model for the VE-IMS Example
nation, if needed, arrange for visits, and provide a list of
competent movers with their quotes.
Require free
quotes
Search
available
companies
Making an
appointment
Spot field
Investigate
Returning
Calculating cost,
& Estimate dates
Reject or
accept
the offer
Figure 2. Model for the Scenario 1
Another, extended, service the VE-IMS may provide is
finding an international mover and arranging temporary
places of residence at both the locations of departure and
destination, based on the dates of moving, travel, and the
arrival of the household effects. The temporary place of
residence at the destination should be close to a certain
address such as the customer’s working place. Customer can
also ask for travel arrangements to be made. The time to fly
and time of staying the temporary place should be worked
out to minimize the total costs. Further, the customer may
want the VE-IMS to find an available childcare place for
the children of the customer as soon as possible, then find
a rental home close by around the time that the household
effects arrive.
Find Moving
Companies
Travel
Arrangement
Temporary Stay
Arrangement
Home
Search
School/childcare
Search
Figure 3. Model for the Scenario 2
2.1. Available resources supporting the example
We have found following available Web services, feeds,
widgets, and mashups from web sites like syndic8.com and
programmableweb.com.

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A list of available feeds, Web services, widgets, gadgets,
mashups that can be used as components in implementing
the example:
1) Childcare Position Offered in France.
2) Childcare Position Wanted in France
3) Dental Plan Comparison: Compare Dental Plans Side-
By-Side, Dental News, And Dental Coverage Informa-
tion
4) Cheap Flights Special Deals: Europe low cost, the
worldwide cheap flights search engine. Price compar-
ison on low cost flights in real time.
5) Hotels & Accomodations Special Deals: Find hotels
anywhere in the world using our worldwide hotel
search engine. Accomodations price comparison in
real time.
6) Home Value Calculator: Uses Zillow data to calculate
the value of single-family homes in the U.S. Small
widget suitable for placing on your Google home page.
7) My Camps Facebook APP: Facebook application for
searching, rating, reviewing, and sharing summer
camps. Put your favorite camps on the map and meet
other friends who share the same experiences.
8) Real Estate Daily Widget: Real estate facts, terms,
people, websites, history, and events in a Google
Gadget. Each day of the year contains a reference
about the real estate and housing industries.
9) Easy One Loan and Home Values: Mashup of Zillow
and Yahoo Maps as supplement to online mortgage
service.
10) Child Care Finder. Find babysitters, nannies, and other
care options visually with Google Maps.
11) PeekaCity API Users Google Streetview for neighbor-
hood amenities PeekaCity is used primarily by real
estate agents as a service to their customers (currently
in Chicago and Dallas/Fort Worth). The addition of
Street View enables customers to view street level
photos of properties, and virtually drive up and down
the streets in the neighborhood.
12) Moving Companies Feeds from 123movers.
13) Moving Tips Feeds from 123movers.
Table 1. Services v.s. Avaiable Web Services
Find Moving Service:
Travel Arrangement:
Temporary Stay Arrangement:
Home Search:
School/childcare Search:
Settling in Service:
Leaving Assistance:
12, 13
4
5,7,8,11
6,8,9,11
1,2,10,11
3,11
6
We provide information of which services can be imple-
mented by which available Web services, feeds, widgets,
and mashups in Table 1. It shows that the core business
of VE-IMS can be fulfilled by existing resources manually
in the certain areas, i.e. up to a user’s requirements. The
list of available Web services, feeds, widgets, and mashups
do not include universal school or child care information,
home searching information even information of universal
cheap fight tickets. Therefore, we do need a mechanism
which support to look for related to users required resources
such as Web services, feeds, and widgets and to compose
them automatically. To be able to finding related resources,
we need semantic technologies. We can thus annotate Web
services, feeds, widgets and so on in advance and compose
them automatically. In section 4, we will discuss it further.
In this example case, it will be expensive and difficult to
build a traditional workflow system to support the business
process. It means that we have to know all information
in advance or providing an interface to add information
in the traditional workflow solution. The dependences are
various, such as finding a home close to the best school/
the available child care, find the good schools close to
the home address. It would however be handy for using a
business process mashup solution, specially, if automatically
invocation of needed feeds, Web services, etc. and execution
processes are supported. The different processes of VE-IMS
can be implemented by different process instances. Users
(i.e. owner of VE-IMS) may only need to edit the certain
processes to be able to meet all requirements from new
customers.
3. Characteristics of process-oriented enter-
prise mashups
Process-oriented mashups in the enterprise can help to
solve both business and IT challenges, especially for small,
medium and virtual enterprises that have less resources to
create traditional BPM solutions. Businesses seek greater
agility, greater configurability, cross-platform and need to
respond faster to an increasing pace of business. A process-
oriented enterprise mashup offers the next step in technology
to aid business people to find best deals over the Web.
Process-oriented enterprise mashups should also be end-
user friendly. The creation of process-oriented applications
should be based on reusability and adaptability. It should
not require high IT skills from the end users to create or
customize mashups.
Process-oriented enterprise mashups help to solve these
challenges through self-service application development, en-
abling to move to the next level of innovation, speed, and
agility by allowing users to combine and remix different
sets of data in new ways. In this way, process-oriented en-
terprise mashups can provide insight into corporate data that
was simply not possible before. Process-oriented enterprise
mashups have thus following characteristics:
• Support enterprise users
• Fit within enterprise information system context (be
supportable, scalable etc.)