SEKE 2012 Proceedings - Knowledge Systems Institute

Implementing Web Applications as Social Machines
Composition: a Case Study
Kellyton dos Santos Brito 1,2 , Lenin Ernesto Abadie
Otero 2 , Patrícia Fontinele Muniz 2 , Leandro Marques
Nascimento 1,2
1 DEINFO – Federal Rural University of Pernambuco
Recife, Brazil
[ksb, leao, pfm, lmn]@cin.ufpe.br
Vanilson André de Arruda Burégio 2 , Vinicius
Cardoso Garcia 2 , Silvio Romero de Lemos Meira 2,3
2 Informatics Center – Federal University of Pernambuco
3 C.E.S.A.R - Recife, Brazil
[vaab, vcg, srlm]@cin.ufpe.br
Abstract: With the evolution of the web and the concepts of web
3.0 as known as programmable web, several issues need to be
studied in order to develop, deploy and use this new kind of
application in a more effective way, such as communication
between systems, unstructured data and non-scalable protocols,
among others issues. In this regard, a new concept – named Social
Machines – emerged to describe web based information systems
that interact for a common purpose. In order to apply and
validate in practice this new model, in this paper we describe a
case study which implements a web application that is a
composition of several public and well-known services from
different application domains, such as Wikipedia, Flickr, Twitter,
Google Places and Google Maps, following the Social Machines’
model. In the end, we present the results and some improvement
suggestions for the model.
Keywords: social machines, web development, sociable
applications, programmable web, case study.
I. INTRODUCTION
In web 3.0, the web as a programming platform [1],
software is developed for the web, through the web, and in the
web, using the web both as programming platform and
deployment and execution environments. Thus, nowadays
computing means connecting [2], due to the fact that
developing software is almost the same as connecting services
[3]. Examples of this scenario are the development of
Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo!, Salesforce, Google, Amazon and
many others, that makes their APIs available for anyone to
develop applications that interact with their services.
In addition to those popular APIs, there are several public
APIs and several applications that use them. For example, the
ProgrammableWeb website 1 reached 5000 APIs in February
2012, and in the same month it listed more than 6500 mashups
using them. Although there have been many studies about the
future of the internet and concepts such as web 3.0,
programmable web [1, 4], linked data [5] and semantic web [6,
7], the segmentation of data and the issues regarding the
communication among systems, unstructured data, unreliable
parts and non-scalable protocols are all native characteristics
of the internet that needs a unifying view and explanations in
1 www.programmableweb.com
order to be developed, deployed and used in a more efficient
and effective way.
Furthermore, the read/write and programmable web are
recent enough to represent very serious difficulties in
understanding their basic elements and how they can be
efficiently combined to develop real, practical systems in
either personal, social or enterprise contexts. So, Meira et al.
[8, 9] defined the concept of a web of Social Machines, in
order to provide a common and coherent conceptual basis for
understanding this still immature, upcoming and possibly
highly innovative phase of software development.
In this context, in order to validate the Social Machines
model and to test solutions for open issues, in this paper we
revisited and applied the concepts of social machines, by
performing a case study of a new application, according to
following structure: in Section II we briefly present the Social
Machines concept; in Section III we present a case study with
the implementation of an application using the concept and
guidelines; Section IV discusses the benefits, difficulties and
challenges; and Section V concludes the paper and presents
future works.
II. THE WEB OF SOCIAL MACHINES
The concept of Social Machines overlaps other research
fields and issues currently well studied such as SaaS, Cloud
Computing, SOA and Social Networks, but we have not found
works that directly deals with the concept adopted by this
study. Roush [2] proposed Social Machine representing human
operated machines responsible for socializing information
among communities; Patton [10] defines them as virtual
machines operating in given social fields; Fuglsang [11]
discussed them as systems that (in society) consume, produce
and record information and are connected at large; and
Hendler [12] discusses social machines based on Berners-Lee
[13] who defines social machines as machines that do the
system and social administration while the people do the
creative work. In addition, the robotics view of a social
machine is that of one that can relate to people [14].
The social machine concept adopted by this work is an
abstract model to describe web based information systems that
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