Building Data Sources with Linked Open Data to Enrich Mashup Platforms

Nowadays, a huge amount of information is available in the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud. This paper reports the use of LOD to enrich mashup plat-forms, which are web tools implementing visual mechanisms to access, compose, modify and use data sources typically available through APIs. Even if many APIs are currently available, it often happens that, due to the specific and diverse end users’ information needs, no data source can satisfy such needs. This limitation may be overcome by introducing a polymorphic data source built upon the LOD datasets. Implementation in a mashup plat-form, as well as benefits of the polymorphic data source, are briefly present-ed. The paper concludes by discussing novel developments of this research.