Jasminko Novak, Benjamin J.J. Voigt - Mashups are web applications combining content and functionality from different online sources via publicly available interfaces (e.g. API, RSS). This allows end-users to create new websites that dynamically combine services of existing providers. The website Programmable Web lists almost 800 such applications. Still, little work has analyzed their structural properties, design dimensions and socio-technical implications. In this paper we propose and applying a specific conceptual framework for analyzing and evaluating mashups. The results of an exploratory study identify current trend and a dominant design model of sucessful mashups as well as critical aspects, limitations and chances for future development.

Global conservation assessments require information on the distribution of biodiversity across the planet. Yet this information is often mapped at a very coarse spatial resolution relative to the scale of most land-use and management decisions. Furthermore, such mapping tends to focus selectively on better-known elements of biodiversity (e.g., vertebrates).We introduce a new approach to describing and mapping the global distribution of terrestrial biodiversity that may help to alleviate these problems. This approach focuses on estimating spatial pattern in emergent properties of biodiversity (richness and compositional turnover) rather than distributions of individual species, making it well suited to lesser-known, yet highly diverse, biological groups.We have developed a global biodiversity model linking these properties to mapped ecoregions and fine-scale environmental surfaces. The model is being calibrated progressively using extensive biological data sets for a wide variety of taxa.We also describe an analytical approach to applying our model in global conservation assessments, illustrated with a preliminary analysis of the representativeness of the world’s protected-area system. Our approach is intended to complement, not compete with, assessments based on individual species of particular conservation concern.