Investigating web APIs on the World Wide Web

Abstract—The world of services on the Web, thus far limited to “classical ” Web services based on WSDL and SOAP, has been increasingly marked by the domination of Web APIs, characterised by their relative simplicity and their natural suitability for the Web. Currently, the development of Web APIs is rather autonomous, guided by no established standards or rules, and Web API documentation is commonly not based on an interface description language such as WSDL, but is rather given directly in HTML as part of a webpage. As a result, the use of Web APIs requires extensive manual effort and the wealth of existing work on supporting common service tasks, including discovery, composition and invocation, can hardly be reused or adapted to APIs. Before we can achieve a higher level of automation and can make any significant improvement to current practices and technologies, we need to reach a deeper understanding of these. Therefore, in this paper we present a thorough analysis of the current landscape of Web API forms and descriptions, which has up-to-date remained unexplored. We base our findings on manually examining a body of publicly available APIs and, as a result, provide conclusions about common description forms, output types, usage of API parameters, invocation support, level of reusability, API granularity and authentication details. The collected data provides a solid basis for identifying deficiencies and realising how we can overcome existing limitations. More importantly, our analysis can be used as a basis for devising common standards and guidelines for Web API development. Keywords-Web APIs, RESTful services, Web services I

Towards Automated Invocation of Web APIs

This paper, targeting the large variety of Web APIs, presents an approach towards automated invocation of Web APIs. This approach applies a data schema, to the SAWSDL lowering schema mapping, a grounding mechanism that connects the ontological representations of Web APIs with their execution messages. It is intuitive to existing standard efforts and effective in coping with the heterogeneities witnessed by a majority of Web APIs

Web API Fragility: How Robust is Your Web API Client

Web APIs provide a systematic and extensible approach for application-to-application interaction. A large number of mobile applications makes use of web APIs to integrate services into apps. Each Web API's evolution pace is determined by their respective developer and mobile application developers are forced to accompany the API providers in their software evolution tasks. In this paper we investigate whether mobile application developers understand and how they deal with the added distress of web APIs evolving. In particular, we studied how robust 48 high profile mobile applications are when dealing with mutated web API responses. Additionally, we interviewed three mobile application developers to better understand their choices and trade-offs regarding web API integration.Comment: Technical repor

A topic modeling approach for web service annotation

The actual implementation of semantic-based mechanisms for service retrieval has been restricted, given the resource-intensive procedure involved in the formal specification of services, which generally comprises associating semantic annotations to their documentation sources. Typically, developer performs such a procedure by hand, requiring specialized knowledge on models for semantic description of services (e.g. OWL-S, WSMO, SAWSDL), as well as formal specifications of knowledge. Thus, this semantic-based service description procedure turns out to be a cumbersome and error-prone task. This paper introduces a proposal for service annotation, based on processing web service documentation for extracting information regarding its offered capabilities. By uncovering the hidden semantic structure of such information through statistical analysis techniques, we are able to associate meaningful annotations to the services operations/resources, while grouping those operations into non-exclusive semantic related categories. This research paper belongs to the TelComp 2.0 project, which Colciencas and University of Cauca founded in cooperation.En términos prácticos, la implementación de mecanismos de recuperación de servicios basados en semántica ha sido limitada, debido al costoso procedimiento que involucra la especificación formal de servicios. Este procedimiento comprende una tarea dispendiosa de anotación semántica, la cual se lleva a cabo manualmente por desarrolladores de servicios, quienes, además, deben conocer modelos para la descripción semántica de este tipo de recursos (p. ej. OWL-S, WSMO, SAWSDL). Para superar esta limitación, este artículo introduce una propuesta para la anotación de servicios web, basada en el procesamiento de su documentación disponible, para extraer la información relacionada con las capacidades que estos ofrecen. Al descubrir la estructura semántica oculta de dicha información, a través de técnicas de análisis estadístico, el mecanismo propuesto es capaz de asociar anotaciones relevantes a las operaciones/recursos de los servicios, así como agruparlos en categorías semánticas no exclusivas. Este artículo de investigación está enmarcado en del proyecto TelComp 2.0, financiado por Colciencias y la Universidad del Cauca

Un enfoque basado en modelos temáticos para la anotación semántica de servicios

The actual implementation of semantic-based mechanisms for service retrieval has been restricted, given the resource-intensive procedure involved in the formal specification of services, which generally comprises associating semantic annotations to their documentation sources. Typically, developer performs such a procedure by hand, requiring specialized knowledge on models for semantic description of services (e.g. OWL-S, WSMO, SAWSDL), as well as formal specifications of knowledge. Thus, this semantic-based service description procedure turns out to be a cumbersome and error-prone task. This paper introduces a proposal forservice annotation, based on processing web service documentation for extracting information regarding its offered capabilities. By uncovering the hidden semantic structure of such information through statistical analysis techniques, we are able to associate meaningful annotations to the services operations/resources, while grouping those operations into non-exclusive semantic related categories. This research paper belongs to the TelComp 2.0 project, which Colciencas and University of Cauca founded in cooperation.En términos prácticos, la implementación de mecanismos de recuperación de servicios basados en semántica ha sido limitada, debido al costoso procedimiento que involucra la especificación formal de servicios. Este procedimiento comprende una tarea dispendiosa de anotación semántica, la cual se lleva a cabo manualmente por desarrolladores de servicios, quienes, además, deben conocer modelos para la descripción semántica de este tipo de recursos (p. ej. OWL-S, WSMO, SAWSDL). Para superaresta limitación, este artículo introduce una propuesta para la anotación de servicios web, basada en el procesamiento de su documentación disponible, para extraer la información relacionada con las capacidades que estos ofrecen. Al descubrir la estructura semántica oculta de dicha información, a través de técnicas de análisis estadístico, el mecanismo propuesto es capaz de asociar anotaciones relevantes a las operaciones/recursos de losservicios, así como agruparlos en categorías semánticas no exclusivas. Este artículo de investigación está enmarcado en del proyecto TelComp 2.0, financiado por Colciencias y la Universidad del Cauca