Purpose – In the last year, several researchers have proposed solutions for facilitating the access to Web services and APIs through visual user interfaces. There is, indeed, an increasing number of resources that provide content in different formats through programmatic interfaces, while it is still difficult for laypeople, i.e., users without expertise in programming (end users in the following), to access and exploit the content they made available. Our research aims at enabling end users to create their own software applications for exploring and composing data sources, in order to satisfy their situational information needs, also by also exploiting the Linked Open Data as new data source. Design/methodology/approach – Our work aims to combine End-User Development principles with the mashup models and technologies adopting a meta-design approach. We start from a generic mashup platform and we adapt it with respect to the requirements identified within a specific community of users. Besides several inspections of the different prototypes, formative evaluations and user tests in the university laboratory, we performed two field studies in different application domains in order to verify the usefulness of content made available by distributed data sources, as well as the overall validity of our composition approach. Originality/value – Our platform is based on a general-purpose mashup environment [Cappiello et al. 2011a], in which the composition of interactive spaces exploits a “lightweight” paradigm for the integration of heterogeneous resources, mainly adopting visual mechanisms. Thanks to the adoption of platform-independent modelling abstractions, the structure of the composed applications is specified in automatically-generated schemas that can be deployed on multiple devices. Such a separation of concerns, together with the possibility to extend the platform with ad-hoc visualization templates, and the ease of packaging ad-hoc content resources, facilitate the customization of our meta-design approach to specific application domains. Practical implications – Since the first time mashups were proposed in the Web technology scenario, researchers have been discussing about the potential of mashup platforms as tools to enable user-driven innovation [Daniel et al. 2011]. Our mashup platform can be considered an important tool of an entrepreneurial ecosystem. Such ecosystem is characterized by the presence of multiple actors (academic institutions, business operators and public institutions) who work collaboratively to start the processes of development of entrepreneurial skills, as well as to promote the incubation of innovative ideas and research initiatives with market potential.
