Mashups

Mashups are certainly an exciting new genre of Web applications. The combination of data modeling technologies stemming from the Semantic Web domain and the maturation of loosely-coupled, service-oriented, platform-agnostic communication protocols is finally providing the infrastructure needed to start developing applications that can leverage and integrate the massive amount of information that is available on the Web. As mashup applications gain higher visibility, it will be interesting to see how the genre impacts social issues such as fair-use and intellectual property as well as other application domains that integrate data across organizational boundaries, such as grid computing and business-to-business workflow management.
For a deeper-dive into mashup development, stay tuned for the launching of a new series of tutorials on developerWorks that will teach you how to construct your own mashups. In fact, the series will even teach you how to use Semantic Web technology and ontologies to enable others to create their own mashups.