mashpoint: supporting data-centric navigation on the web.

Large numbers of Web sites support rich data-centric features to explore and interact with data en masse. For example, online shopping or travel sites routinely offer users ways to filter, explore and interact with their data. The ability to find related information on other Web sites about selected subsets of the data, however, is currently compromised by the Web's inherent, one document at a time, navigation. In this paper we present work-in-progress on mashpoint, a framework that allows distributed data-powered Web applications to exchange subsets of their data, in effect enabling many-to-many navigation on the Web, at a more granular, data level. We hypothesise that allowing such navigation unlocks novel possibilities for information exploration and interaction on the Web. We present an initial prototype and discuss the opportunities and challenges of facilitating this kind of interaction.