Mashups have begun to converge with another nascent technology: cloud
computing.
Cloud computing provides software, storage and computing capacity as a service. Examples include software-as-a-service offerings such as Salesforce.com and computing resource services such as Amazon.com’s Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.
“Mashups and cloud computing are separate but complementary trends,” said John Cimral, chief executive officer of Kapow Technologies.
Vendors such as Kapow say their mashup wares can play a role in the cloud. Cimral said mashup technology can help migrate and share structured and unstructured data in the cloud.
John Crupi, chief technology officer of JackBe, said the company is testing its mashup platform on Amazon’s cloud.
He said customers could potentially push terabytes of historical data to the cloud and use mashups to analyze that data.
Government managers are no strangers to the challenge of trying to combine data stored in different systems into a more useful composite picture. The task is even more complex because the systems housing this data were usually not built with flexibility and sharing in mind.
The emergence of so-called mashups represents a new take on this old problem. Mashups are Web applications that pull together select data and software functionality from two or more sources. Mashups, considered a segment of Web 2.0 technology, come in two flavors: consumer and enterprise mashups.
A consumer mashup taps publicly available Web sources to create a new application. For example, Housingmaps.com, an early mashup, combines Google Maps with housing listings from Craigslist. Meanwhile, enterprise mashups can tap both external sources and internal systems for data.
In both cases, the mashups employ existing resources to create an application rather than building entirely from scratch. This approach addresses another long-standing government issue: software reuse. Mashups also let agencies take advantage of previous investments in service-oriented architecture. SOA encourages a segmented approach to software development, and those components — often developed as Web services — can feed a mashup.
Mashups can be quick and easy ways to create useful new applications, but they can also raise security and data integrity issues that agencies must address.
Government use Mashups have begun to surface in government agencies.
For example, the Housing and Urban Development Department uses the mashup approach in its National Housing Locator System. The system, developed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, lets government users identify available temporary housing for people displaced by a disaster. It was recently employed to identify housing sources before the arrival of Hurricane Gustav.
HUD’s locator system pulls in housing data that was previously isolated in various local, state and federal systems. The locator combines the housing data with other elements, including Google’s map application programming interface (API) and internally developed geocoding services.
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