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Mashups have been studied extensively in the literature; nevertheless, the large body of work in this area focuses on service/data level integration and leaves UI level integration, hence UI mashups, almost unexplored. The latter generates digital environments in which participating sources exist as individual entities; member applications and data sources share the same graphical space particularly in the form of widgets. However, the true integration can only be realized through enabling widgets to be responsive to the events happening in each other. The authors call such an integration “widget orchestration” and the resulting application “mashup by orchestration”. This article aims to explore and address challenges regarding the realization of widget‐based UI mashups and UI level integration, prominently in terms of widget orchestration, and to assess their suitability for building web‐based personal environments.

The authors provide a holistic view on mashups and a theoretical grounding for widget‐based personal environments. The authors identify the following challenges: widget interoperability, end‐user data mobility as a basis for manual widget orchestration, user behavior mining – for extracting behavioral patterns – as a basis for automated widget orchestration, and infrastructure. The authors introduce functional widget interfaces for application interoperability, exploit semantic web technologies for data interoperability, and realize end‐user data mobility on top of this interoperability framework. The authors employ semantically enhanced workflow/process mining techniques, along with Petri nets as a formal ground, for user behavior mining. The authors outline a reference platform and architecture that is compliant with the authors' strategies, and extend W3C widget specification respectively – prominently with a communication channel – to foster standardization. The authors evaluate their solution approaches regarding interoperability and infrastructure through a qualitative comparison with respect to existing literature, and provide a computational evaluation of the behavior mining approach. The authors realize a prototype for a widget‐based personal learning environment for foreign language learning to demonstrate the feasibility of their solution strategies. The prototype is also used as a basis for the end‐user assessment of widget‐based personal environments and widget orchestration.

The evaluation results suggest that the interoperability framework, platform, and architecture have certain advantages over existing approaches, and the proposed behavior mining techniques are adequate for the extraction of behavioral patterns. User assessments show that widget‐based UI mashups with orchestration (i.e. mashups by orchestration) are promising for the creation of personal environments as well as for an enhanced user experience.

This article provides an extensive exploration of mashups by orchestration and their role in the creation of personal environments. Key challenges are described, along with novel solution strategies to meet them.

The paper seeks to highlight how academic libraries are harnessing widgets to make library resources easily and conveniently accessible to users. Examining the characteristic features, purposes of use and types of widget applications, the paper aims to measure the degree of implementation of widget among academic libraries in different regions.

A stratified sampling method was followed for selecting four samples of population, each representing one of the four continents (North America, Europe, Australia and Asia) and content analysis was used to collect data along the checkpoints.

Giving a comparative account of widget implementation along the select dimensions, the study focused on relative acceptance of widgets among the continents and emphasized the areas where widget is being applied most. With examples, the study also illustrated the relevance of the different approaches taken by various libraries.

The study was confined to selected libraries of higher education institutes among the four continents only. Libraries having non‐English websites and restricted or limited access were not included.

This unique investigation presented a comprehensive picture of widget implementation among the academic libraries across the world. The findings will serve as a valuable guide for future librarians who wish to incorporate such technologies in library websites. Furthermore, the checkpoints used here may serve as a bedrock for framing questionnaire and interview schedule for conducting future research investigating users' perception of this new web‐based tool in order to comprehend fully the practicability and usefulness of widget.

This paper aims to present a collaborative mashup platform for dynamic integration of heterogeneous data sources. The platform encourages sharing and connects data publishers, integrators, developers and end users.

This approach is based on a visual programming paradigm and follows three fundamental principles: openness, connectedness and reusability. The platform is based on semantic Web technologies and the concept of linked widgets, i.e. semantic modules that allow users to access, integrate and visualize data in a creative and collaborative manner.

The platform can effectively tackle data integration challenges by allowing users to explore relevant data sources for different contexts, tackling the data heterogeneity problem and facilitating automatic data integration, easing data integration via simple operations and fostering reusability of data processing tasks.

This research has focused exclusively on conceptual and technical aspects so far; a comprehensive user study, extensive performance and scalability testing is left for future work.

A key contribution of this paper is the concept of distributed mashups. These ad hoc data integration applications allow users to perform data processing tasks in a collaborative and distributed manner simultaneously on multiple devices. This approach requires no server infrastructure to upload data, but rather allows each user to keep control over their data and expose only relevant subsets. Distributed mashups can run persistently in the background and are hence ideal for real-time data monitoring or data streaming use cases. Furthermore, we introduce automatic mashup composition as an innovative approach based on an explicit semantic widget model.

This paper aims to understand how users' perceptions of the different functions of blogs vary in educational use and personal use, and further to explore whether experience with blogs has an influence on differences in perceptions of blog functions.

To empirically determine whether the blog functions were suitable for educational and personal use, a blog system with numerous functions was constructed for users to evaluate. In total, 48 college students were recruited to participate in the study. The participants navigated this system and then filled in a questionnaire to give their opinions on the functions of both educational blogs and personal blogs.

The findings of this study indicate that of the 26 blog functions, perceptions of 20 of the functions differed significantly between educational and personal use. Moreover, the results showed that only two blog functions, backup and traffic source, were influenced by both blog experience and blog usage.

This study distinguishes itself from the previous studies on blogging systems in its specific focus on functionality with detailed evaluation under different purposes of contexts. Practical suggestions are accordingly made for practitioners to choose when and which functions to use under different circumstances to enhance the interaction and information exchange between users in the field practice of educational blogging.

In this paper, we present a proposed information environment (PROPIE) for enhanced interaction and value‐adding of electronic documents (e‐documents). The design of PROPIE was based on a thorough user needs and requirements assessment in interacting with information through well‐documented findings, and a focus group with twelve participants to elicit features that were deemed desirable in future interactions. The design was also based on an earlier work which reviewed the advancements in various user interface (UI) technologies, visualisation and interactive techniques, and a consideration of novel information structuring and organisation techniques that pose important implications for the design of more advanced UIs. Providing a suite of novel features and interactive tools that can be flexibly combined, PROPIE allows users to apply multiple novel ways to query intuitively and navigate information in an e‐document. The querying and browsing processes in PROPIE are supported by various interactive and visualisation techniques. Users work within a visually sovereign, integrated environment for information gathering and organising, based on navigable, fractional information objects that are also affiliated with rich metadata and additional layers of value‐adding information. A set of interface mock‐ups was developed to demonstrate the potential of the environment in supporting the design of a new generation of electronic journals (e‐journals). We report here empirical results from a study conducted to obtain representative users‘ feedback with regard to using PROPIE for interacting with e‐journals. Twenty‐two participants from a variety of academic backgrounds participated in the evaluation. Overall, PROPIE was found to have the potential both for enhancing the user’s interaction with information captured within e‐journals and for adding value to e‐documents in various ways.

Leading edge corporations in a variety of industries are discovering the advantages of using their strategic marketing initiatives to direct their reengineering efforts. When all the functions of an organization are willing to accept new marketing opportunities as common goals, then reengineering—usually a painful process can become a legitimate means of attaining them.

If corporate America's love affair with 1970s‐style strategic planning is not over, it is certainly on the rocks. Planning that relies on past experience, extrapolation, and incremental moves cannot meet today's challenges, such as unexpected competition, saturated markets, and changing technologies.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the usability (effectiveness, efficiency and user satisfaction) of e‐feedback interfaces. The experiment compares a traditional visual approach with a multimodal approach in order to determine the impact of multimodal metaphors upon the user's understanding, reasoning and engagement with the e‐feedback.

The empirical investigation involved visual (text with graphical illustrations) and multimodal (audio‐visual with expressive avatars and recorded speech) experimental e‐feedback platforms. Both experimental platforms provided the same e‐feedback but used different interaction metaphors to convey the information. The evaluation approach measured effectiveness, efficiency and user satisfaction.

The results showed that the multimodal approach increased usability in terms of effectiveness, efficiency and engagement of users with the e‐feedback. There is a very clear prima facie case that combining different communication metaphors to convey information involved in the e‐feedback simultaneously does not increase the information overload on users. This however was observed to be the case when the visual channel was used.

This paper introduces a unique approach that uses specific combinations of multimodal metaphors to communicate information about e‐feedback simultaneously. This approach increased the usability of e‐feedback and user's engagement in interfaces for e‐learning applications.