Mashups are an exciting genre of new Web applications that gained considerable momentum, recently. While thousands of mashup applications exist and many software vendors promote “Enterprise Mashup” suites, the term “mashup” itself lacks concise definition and the usefulness of mashups in specific fields of operation remains unclear. 

In this work, 29 mashups and tools to create mashups have been studied in a qualitative survey that revealed two general types and eight common characteristics of mashups. This survey forms the basis of a general mashup pattern that specifies mashups by their characteristic behavior of aggregating capabilities on the Web. A reference model, complying with this pattern, provides means to understand existing and design new mashups on a conceptual level.
In a further step, this knowledge has been used to examine the suitability of mashups in the field of business process management. Specific application scenarios were analyzed comprehensively on the basis of the business process life cycle, revealing significant potential aggregating fragmented process knowledge and providing lightweight process implementations.