The mashup era has emerged in response to the challenge of integrating existing services, data sources, and tools to generate new applications. Mashups are usually realized either through a seamless integration, in which only the resulting application is known by the end-users, or through integration of original applications, data sources, and tools, particularly in terms of widgets, into the same graphical space, in which participating applications and data sources are identifiable by the end-users. The former composes a unified functionality or data presentation/source from the original sources. The latter generates a digital environment in which participating sources exist as individual entities, but the true integration can only be realized through enabling widgets to be responsive to the events happening in each other. We call such an integration widget orchestration. In this paper, we provide a holistic view on the mashup era and a theoretical grounding for widget-based digital environments, we elaborate on key challenges for realizing such environments and (semi-)automatic widget orchestration, and we introduce our solution strategies. We identified following challenges: widget interoperability, user-behavior mining, and infrastructure. We introduce functional interfaces (FWI) for application interoperability, exploit semantic web technologies for data interoperability, and investigate the possibility of employing workflow/process mining techniques, along with Petri nets as a formal ground, for user-behavior mining. We outline a reference platform and architecture, compliant with our strategies, to foster re-usability of widgets and development of standardized widgetbased environments. We have implemented a prototype for a Widget-based Personal Learning Environment (WIPLE) for foreign language learning in order to demonstrate the feasibility of our solution strategies, framework, and architecture.

Regardless of their name (dictionary, glossary, encyclopaedia, or even 'leximat', in the case of a new generation of online, semi-automated lexicographic tools), subject-field, purpose, or medium (paper or cyber), lexicographic reference works should be regarded as functional information tools that are solely designed to cater to the information needs of their users in different usage situations and that consequently help them solve specific communication (reading, writing, translation) or knowledge problems (acquiring new knowledge or verifying existing knowledge, learning a language or a subject field). In this article, we briefly outline the evolution of lexicographic reference works from stand-alone to multifunctional lexicographic tools, and we describe the theoretical principles and innovative functionalities of a new task and problem-oriented lexical database, the Base Lexicale du Franc¸ais. In line with Tarp (2006), a tool that should be truly regarded as a 'leximat'.

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