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Most computer users have had the experience of wanting to view sets of information side by side but being thwarted because the information comes from different sources. Often, they resort to cutting and pasting from one to another. An emerging technology for overcoming that barrier is so-called "mashup" software, which provides a unified view of information from different sources. Although a small market now, those products are increasingly providing an alternative to time-consuming manual processes or expensive custom integrations.
A mashup presents information from two or more sources in a single interface, via a micro-integration that is usually at the presentation or data level. The term is borrowed from the musical world-a musical piece is combined with one or more others to create a third "original" musical piece. On the Internet, one of the earliest mashups was a combination of crime data with map data from Google (google.com), to show a geographic representation of crime rates.
"The promise of mashups is that they allow individual users to combine content on the fly that is completely tailored to their needs and their working style," says Oliver Young, an analyst at Forrester (for rester.com). "Mashups allow users to create their own mini-application without IT oversight or resources." At this point, Young adds, the major obstacle is that most data sources are not yet built on a service-oriented architecture (SOA), so drawing in the information is not easy. Although mashups can be created without SOA, they are greatly facilitated by that technology.
Companies that have not implemented SOA can create mashups using a variety of tools that are intended to create data services where none previously existed. "These are basically screen scrapes," says Young, "and they have value, but are not transformational. They are an interim method of bridging the gap between legacy applications and mashups, without relying on SOA."
In the public sector, knowledge workers frequently need to access and interpret information from multiple sources. In the intelligence community, the need for rapid updates and analysis is ongoing. At the Defense Intelligence Agency (dia.mil), a system called OverWatch monitors areas...