Damia Data Mashups for Intranet Applications David E Simmen Mehmet Altinel Volker Markl Sriram Padmanabhan Ashutosh Singh IBM Almaden Research Center 650 Harry Road San Jose CA 95120 USA simmen maltinel marklv srp asingh us ibm com systems and corporate intranets in the form of spreadsheets presentations email web services HTML pages etc There is a wealth of valuable information to be gleaned from such data consequently there is an increasing demand for applications that can consume it combine it with data in corporate databases content management systems and other IT managed repositories and then to transform the combined data into timely information ABSTRACT Increasingly large numbers of situational applications are being created by enterprise business users as a by product of solving day to day problems In efforts to address the demand for such applications corporate IT is moving toward Web 2 0 architectures In particular the corporate intranet is evolving into a platform of readily accessible data and services where communities of business users can assemble and deploy situational applications Damia is a web style data integration platform being developed to address the data problem presented by such applications which often access and combine data from a variety of sources Damia allows business users to quickly and easily create data mashups that combine data from desktop web and traditional IT sources into feeds that can be consumed by AJAX and other types of web applications This paper describes the key features and design of Damia s data integration engine which has been packaged with Mashup Hub an enterprise feed server currently available for download on IBM alphaWorks Mashup Hub exposes Damia s data integration capabilities in the form of a service that allows users to create hosted data mashups Consider for example a scenario where a prudent bank manager wants to be notified when a recent job applicant s credit score dips below 500 so that she might avoid a potentially costly hiring mistake by dropping an irresponsible applicant from consideration Data on recent applicants resides on her desktop in a personal spreadsheet Access to credit scores is available via a corporate database She persuades a contract programmer in the accounting department to build her a web application that combines the data from these two sources on demand producing an ATOM feed that she can view for changes via her feed reader There are a large number of such situational applications being created by business users and departmental IT staff as an offshoot of solving day to day problems These applications typically target a small community of users and a specialized business need In contrast typical enterprise applications are developed by corporate IT staff for a large number of generic users and a general purpose Situational applications represent the long tail of enterprise application development consequently there is a significant opportunity for IT researchers and professionals to create innovations that facilitate their development Categories and Subject Descriptors H m Information Systems Miscellaneous General Terms Design The second trend is happening outside the enterprise where the Web has evolved from primarily a publication platform to a participatory platform spurred by Web 2 0 paradigms and technologies that are fueling an explosion in collaboration communities and the creation of user generated content The main drivers propelling this advancement of the Web as an extensible development platform is the plethora of valuable data and services being made available along with the lightweight programming and deployment technologies those allow these resources to be mixed and published in innovative new ways Keywords Information Integration XML Data Feed 1 INTRODUCTION There are two important trends motivating the need for a new type of enterprise information integration architecture aimed primarily at satisfying the information integration requirements of situational business applications 1 The first trend is happening inside the enterprise where there is an increasing demand by enterprise business leaders to be able to exploit information residing outside traditional IT silos in efforts to react to situational business needs The predominant share of enterprise business data resides on desktops departmental files Standard data interchange formats such as XML and JSON as well as prevalent syndication formats such as RSS and ATOM allow resources to be published in formats readily consumed by web applications while lightweight access protocols such as REST simplify access to these resources Furthermore weboriented programming technologies like AJAX PHP and Ruby on Rails enable quick and easy creation of mashups which is a term that has been popularized to refer to composite web applications that use resources from multiple sources 2 Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page To copy otherwise or republish to post on servers or to redistribute to lists requires prior specific permission and or a fee SIGMOD 08 June 9 12 2008 Vancouver BC Canada Copyright 2008 ACM 978 1 60558 102 6 08 06 5 00 The Damia project aims to seize upon the aforementioned opportunities to aid situational application development by harnessing many of the Web 2 0 paradigms and technologies that 1171 compiler and other details of the Damia integration engine In section 4 we illustrate Damia s capabilities with use cases Sections 5 and 6 discuss related and future work respectively have spurred the innovation in assembly manifested by the mashup phenomenon We envision corporate IT steadily moving toward web style architectures In particular we envision the corporate intranet steadily evolving into a platform of readily consumable resources and lightweight integration technologies which can be exploited by business users to create enterprise mashups in response to situational business needs The lines between the intranet and Web will progressively blur as enterprise mashups reach outside the corporate firewall to exploit data and services on the Web 2 DAMIA FEED SERVER This section provides a general overview of the Damia feed server architecture The integration engine which is the