Toward process mashups: key ingredients and open research challenges

Over the last few years, the mashup community has grown significantly, and mashup development has matured substantially compared to the initial hacking practices. Mash-ups as applications have specialized into data mashups, service mashups, or user interface mashups -- although these terms lack a common agreement on definitions -- while other types of mashups can still be identified. In fact, recently the term process mashup emerged, yet, again, its meaning is everything but clear. Intrigued by this latter idea, in this paper we try to understand what process mashups are. We identify three dimensions that distinguish process mashups from most of the current types of mashups and we show that exploring them leads to a set of new types of mashups, which are the actual basis for the development of process mashups. For each of these new types of mashups, we provide a discussion, discuss suitable application scenarios and show tool support, so as to highlight challenges and open issues.