most recent, version 2.0, is not.

Atom is a newer, but similar, syndication protocol. It is a proposed standard at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and seeks to maintain better metadata than RSS, provide better and more rigorous documentation, and incorporates the notion of constructs for common data representation.

These syndication technologies are great for mashups that aggregate event-based or updatedriven content, such as news and weblog aggregators.

Technical Challenges

Like any other data integration domain, mashup development is replete with technical challenges that need to be addressed, especially as mashup applications become more feature- and functionalityrich.
This section touches on a handful of these challenges, some of which you can address and mitigate, while others are open issues.

Data Integration Challenges: Semantic Meaning and Data Quality

Qualitative surveys suggest that the number one enterprise IT concern today is data integration within the enterprise virtual organization. (In this context, I use the term virtual organization to mean a composition of federated business units, each contained within its own administrative domain.) Like many enterprise IT managers who find themselves up to the task of integrating legacy data sources (for example, to create corporate dashboards that reflect current business conditions), mashup developers are faced with the analogous challenges of deriving shared semantic meaning between heterogeneous data sets. Therefore, to get an idea for what mashup developers have in store,you need look no further than the storied integration challenges faced by enterprise IT.

For example, translation systems between data models must be designed. When converting data into common forms, reasonable assumptions often have to be made when the mapping is not a complete one (for example, one data source might have a model in which an address-type contains a country-field, whereas another does not). Already challenging, this is exacerbated by the fact that the mashup developers might not be domain experts on the source data models because the models are third-party to them, and these reasonable assumptions might not be intuitive or clear. In addition to missing data or incomplete mappings, the mashup designer might discover that the data they wish to integrate is not suitable for machine automation; that it needs cleansing. For example, law enforcement arrest records might be entered inconsistently, using common abbreviations for names (such as “mkt sqr” in one record and “Market Square” in another), making automated reasoning about equality difficult, even with good heuristics. Semantic modeling technologies, such as RDF, can help ease the problem of automatic reasoning between different data sets, provided that it is built-in to the data-store. Legacy data sources are likely to require much human effort in terms of analysis and data cleansing before they can be availed to semantic modeling technologies.

Mashup developers might also have to contend with several issues that IT integration managers might not, one of which is data pollution. As part of their application design, many mashups solicit public user input. As evidenced in the wiki application domain, this is a double-edged blade: it can be quite powerful because it enables open contribution and best-of-breed data evolution, yet it can be subject to inconsistent, incorrect, or intentionally misleading data entry. The latter can cast doubts on data trustworthiness, which can ultimately compromise the value provided by the mashup. Another host of integration issues facing mashup developers arise when screen scraping techniques must be used for data acquisition. As discussed in the previous section, deriving parsing and acquisition tools and data models requires significant reverse-engineering effort. Even in the best case where these tools and models can be created, all it takes is a re-factoring of how the source site presents its content (or mothballing and abandonment) to break the integration process, and cause mashup application failure.