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

The ODO project: a Case Study in Integration of Multimedia Services

Recent years have witnessed a steady growth in the availability of wide-area multi-service networks. These support a variety of traffic types including data, control messages, audio and video. Consequently they are often thought of as integrated media carriers. To date, however, use of these networks has been limited to isolated applications which exhibit very little or no integration amongst themselves. This paper describes a project which investigated organisational, user interfacing and programming techniques to exploit this integration of services at the application level

Social Networks in The Boardroom

This paper provides empirical evidence consistent with the facts that (1) social networks may strongly affect board composition and (2) social networks may be detrimental to corporate governance. Our empirical investigation relies on a large dataset on executives and outside directors of corporations listed on the Paris stock exchange over the 1992-2003 period. This data source is a matched employer employee dataset providing both detailed information on directors/CEOs and information on the firm employing them. We first find a very strong and robust correlation between the CEO's network and that of his directors. Networks of former high ranking civil servants are the most active in shaping board composition. Our identification strategy takes into account (1) firm and directors' fixed effects and (2) matching of firms and director along one observable and one unobservable characteristic. We then turn to real effects of such network activity. We find that firms where these networks are most active are less likely to change CEO when they underperform. This suggests that social networks in the board room impair corporate governance.

Regulation of Health Plan Provider Networks: Narrow Networks Have Changed Considerably under the Affordable Care Act, but the Trajectory of Regulation Remains Unclear

Health insurance plans with limited networks of providers are common on the Affordable Care Act's (ACA's) health insurance Marketplaces. Recent studies have found that these "narrow network" plans constituted nearly half of all Marketplace offerings in the first two years of coverage, with one analysis concluding that about 90 percent of all consumers had the option of buying such a plan if they chose.Plans with limited networks are not new and are not confined to the Marketplaces. Yet there is reason to believe that they have grown in prevalence partly because of the ACA. Many of the health law's consumer protections--prohibitions on health status underwriting, increased standardization of benefits, a maximum limit on out-of-pocket spending, and the elimination of annual and lifetime limits on benefits, for example--have foreclosed traditional strategies used by insurers to keep costs in check. Meanwhile, other elements of reform, including online Marketplaces that make it easier for consumers to compare plans based on premiums and a financial assistance framework that links the amount of a person's premium tax credit to the cost of the second cheapest plan available to them at the silver metal tier, explicitly encourage insurers to compete on price. These developments appear to have led many insurers to design Marketplace health plans that combined a comparatively low premium with a more restricted choice of providers.Limited network plans might offer value to consumers. Coverage that pairs a low premium with a network that provides meaningful access to health care might meet the needs of many enrollees, no matter the network's overall size. Negotiations between insurers and providers over network participation might encourage more efficient delivery of care. And the power to contract selectively might allow insurers to create networks comprising a subset of providers who meet raised standards of quality, potentially resulting in higher-value care.But these plans also pose risks. A network can be too narrow, jeopardizing the ability of consumers to obtain needed services in a timely manner. This can happen if the network contains an inadequate mix of provider types. For example, a recent examination by Harvard researchers of the network composition of health plans offered on the federal Marketplace during 2015 found that nearly 15 percent of the sampled plans lacked in-network physicians for at least one specialty. Or a network might have an insufficient number of providers: There might be too few physicians who are taking new patients, who are available for an appointment within a reasonable time, or who speak the same language as the enrollee. Certain network limitations also might have the effect of discouraging enrollment by sicker consumers, potentially skewing the risk pool. Plans that provide limited or inadequate access to in-network providers make it more likely that enrollees will obtain care from out-of-network sources, exposing them to significant expenses and the possibility of surprise medical bills.Surveys show that many consumers are open to trading network breadth for a lower premium. They also suggest that, in practice, large numbers of consumers do not find network designs to be transparent. If the features of a plan's network are inadequately explained or its list of participating providers is inaccurate, it might be impossible for consumers to make an informed decision about whether the plan's combination of network and price is right for them.Consumers' experiences with narrow network plans since the ACA's implementation have defied easy characterization. Surveys of the insured, including those with Marketplace coverage, suggest that the vast majority are satisfied with their plan's choice of doctors. Yet anecdotal complaints about networks have proliferated, and the exclusion by some health plans of high-profile hospitals and care facilities has generated media headlines.In light of these developments, and as part of a larger effort to keep pace with changes to the health insurance markets since passage of the ACA, lawmakers and regulators have devoted significant attention to determining how networks should be regulated to ensure they are adequate and transparent. This work has involved efforts to establish or update standards for evaluating the sufficiency of a plan's network, improve the accuracy of provider directories, and protect enrollees from surprise bills from out-of-network providers. This brief offers an overview of state and federal actions that address the first two categories--network standards and provider directories--with a focus on rules that govern plans sold on the ACA's health insurance Marketplaces

BaseFs - Basically Acailable, Soft State, Eventually Consistent Filesystem for Cluster Management

A peer-to-peer distributed filesystem for community cloud management. https://github.com/glic3rinu/basef

Semantic model-driven development of web service architectures.

Building service-based architectures has become a major area of interest since the advent of Web services. Modelling these architectures is a central activity. Model-driven development is a recent approach to developing software systems based on the idea of making models the central artefacts for design representation, analysis, and code generation. We propose an ontology-based engineering methodology for semantic model-driven composition and transformation of Web service architectures. Ontology technology as a logic-based knowledge representation and reasoning framework can provide answers to the needs of sharable and reusable semantic models and descriptions needed for service engineering. Based on modelling, composition and code generation techniques for service architectures, our approach provides a methodological framework for ontology-based semantic service architecture

Petroleum Profit Tax and Nigeria Economic Development

Petroleum Profit Tax is a major source of revenue for the Federal Government of Nigeria to meet its statutory obligations of ensuring the economic development of Nigeria. It assists the government to achieve the country’s macroeconomic objective in the areas of fiscal and monetary policies.However,it has been observed that non-provision of corporate social responsibilities in the communities where there is extraction of crude oil result into constant destruction of production installations, and hindrance to production; tax avoidance and evasion d poor tax administration, and weak fiscal policy have been negating the increase in tax income generated. The main objective of this paper is to assess the relationship between petroleum profit tax and economic development of Nigeria for the enhancement of the welfare of the citizens. Primary and secondary data were used to collect the research data, while chi-square and multiple regression statistical models were used to analyze the results of the field work. The findings reveal that there is a very strong relationship between petroleum profit tax and economic development of Nigeria, tax avoidance and evasion are major hindrance to income growth in this sector, poor tax administration is a problem to effectiveness and efficiency of this source of income, and lack of corporate social responsibilities is causing unrest in the crude oil production zone. The paper recommends the need for the government to make judicious use income generated for the benefits of Nigerians, and among others the need for tax reforms to address the issue of tax evasion and avoidance

Special Libraries, March 1917

Volume 8, Issue 3https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1917/1002/thumbnail.jp