An Effective End-User Development Approach Through Domain-Specific Mashups for Research Impact Evaluation

Abstract

Over the last decade, there has been growing interest in the assessment of the performance of researchers, research groups, universities and even countries. The assessment of productivity is an instrument to select and promote personnel, assign research grants and measure the results of research projects. One particular assessment approach is bibliometrics i.e., the quantitative analysis of scientific publications through citation and content analysis. However, there is little consensus today on how research evaluation should be performed, and it is commonly acknowledged that the quantitative metrics available today are largely unsatisfactory. The process is very often highly subjective, and there are no universally accepted criteria.A number of different scientific data sources available on the Web (e.g., DBLP, Microsoft Academic Search, Google Scholar) that are used for such analysis purposes. Taking data from these diverse sources, performing the analysis and visualizing results in different ways is not a trivial and straight forward task. Moreover, the data taken from these sources cannot be used as it is due to the problem of name disambiguation, where many researchers share identical names or an author different name variations appear in the data. We believe that the personalization of the evaluation processes is a key element for the appropriate use and practical success of these research impact evaluation tasks. Moreover, people involved in such evaluation processes are not always IT experts and hence not capable to crawl data sources, merge them and compute the needed evaluation procedures.The recent emergence of mashup tools has refueled research on end-user development, i.e., on enabling end-users without programming skills to produce their own applications. Yet, similar to what happened with analogous promises in web service composition and business process management, research has mostly focused on technology and, as a consequence, has failed its objective.Plain technology (e.g., SOAP/WSDL web services) or simple modeling languages (e.g., Yahoo! Pipes) do not convey enough meaning to non-programmers. We believe that the heart of the problem is that it is impractical to design tools that are generic enough to cover a wide range of application domains, powerful enough to enable the specification of non-trivial logic, and simple enough to be actually accessible to non-programmers. At some point, we need to give up something. In our view, this something is generality since reducing expressive power would mean supporting only the development of toy applications, which is useless, while simplicity is our major aim.This thesis presents a novel approach for an effective end-user development, specifically for non-programmers. That is, we introduce a domain-specific approach to mashups that "speaks the language of users", i.e., that is aware of the terminology, concepts, rules, and conventions (the domain) the user is comfortable with. We show what developing a domain-specific mashup platform means, which role...