WINDMash : A Visual Mashup Environment Dedicated to the Design of Web Interactive Applications

This paper reports on WINDMash, a visual mashup environment to design interactive applications. WINDMash provides for teachers (end-user designer) a design environment so that they can design interactive applications based on geographical textual documents by themselves. The design process is divided into three successive facets: data, interface and interaction. The data facet enables the designer to create a processing chain in which the input of textual document may be processed by dedicated services (to automatically retrieve the geographical entities from a textual document and to tag them). The tagged information may then be presented to the designer thanks to visual components (e.g. text, map, and calendar). The designer may configure how the visual components display such tagged information thanks to the interface facet. Last, the interaction facet enables the designer to create interactions between visual components.