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May 10, 2006

Data Mashups

Recently, I've been wrestling with the term "data mashup." I think by now we all know what a Web mashup is, or at least have seen an example using Google Maps. But I've heard the term data mashup mentioned a few times in conversation, and I'm wondering if it really means something or is just redundant. I'm leaning toward the former.

Starting off at Wikipedia, the definition of mashup includes a breakdown into three categories: mapping mashups (a la Google), photo and video mashups (a la Flikr), and enterprise mashups (aka clever stuff you do inside your enterprise). This definition is arguably incomplete (where does del.icio.us fit), and typical of Wikipedia (which is more to do with zeitgeist than exactitude), but useful for my purposes. Enterprise mashups seem to be the place where data mashing would be most useful.

Wikipedia goes on to define an enterprise mashup as:

Within enterprises, mashups provide a easy way to visualize data that is spread across the enterprise. Technologies like AJAX have made it easy to build rich and powerful clients by bringing together data from inside and outside enterprises.

To help understand what kinds of data an enterprise might combine and for what purpose, let me give you a few examples we've been kicking around here at Ipedo. One customer wants to combine data from Salesforce.com with existing customer data in Siebel and display it in a Web dashboard. A partner we spoke to wants to cull news about prospects fom RSS feeds and pump it into Salesforce.com - something for the inside sales rep to chat about when cold calling. BusinessWeek's Rob Hof writes about news mashing in his blog. Still another prospect wants weather and market data from the Web combined with internal statistical data to (potentially) gain an edge trading commodities.

Kind of makes sense, but what I'm still wondering is how that's different from another term: data integration. Is it just a Web 2.0 recasting? If I don't program in AJAX or plot my data on a Google Map, is it still a mashup? Or is it just when you start combining external data in XML with internal relational data that it qualifies?

I think Sho Kuwamoto gets it when he writes in a recent post, "Nowadays, there's a lot of talk about Web 2.0, web mashups, AJAX, etc., which in my mind are all facets of the same phenomenon: that information and presentation are being separated in ways that allow for novel forms of reuse."

It's not the use of AJAX per se, it's the separation of data and presentation, with the easily portable data format XML. Kind of reminds me of client/server all over again, but that seems like it was 100 B.C., and definitely uncool to bring up in the company of Web 2.0.

Or maybe the word "mashup" will replace the word "integration" over time, as I thought when I saw this use of the word in James Governor's MonkChips: "There is a new spirit of pragmatism at work in the industry and we're going to see more mashups of API and development styles." Kind of connotes a force-fit combinationan integration hack, if you like.

Will the term data mashup stick? To be determined. Will enterprises become more and more interested in mashing together data from inside and outside the firewall, and in different formats? Absolutely. They will have to, since that's the direction in which their data is headed. Which is why I'm happy that Ipedo has an integration technology that combines (mashes?) a SQL engine for relational data with an XQuery engine for XML data.

In any case, something's going on. Whispering "data mashup" at a cocktail party here in Silicon Valley is almost guaranteed to bring on a EF Hutton moment (Now I'm dating myself - look it up on Google if you don't get it.)

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Posted by Tim Matthews at 12:45 PM | Comments (0)