Paper Info
Title
smartAPI: Towards a More Intelligent Network of Web APIs.
Abstract
Data science increasingly employs cloud-based Web application programming interfaces (APIs). However, automatically discovering and connecting suitable APIs for a given application is difficult due to the lack of explicit knowledge about the structure and datatypes of Web API inputs and outputs. To address this challenge, we conducted a survey to identify the metadata elements that are crucial to the description of Web APIs and subsequently developed the smartAPI metadata specification and associated tools to capture their domain-related and structural characteristics using the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles. This paper presents the results of the survey, provides an overview of the smartAPI specification and a reference implementation, and discusses use cases of smartAPI. We show that annotating APIs with smartAPI metadata is straightforward through an extension of the existing Swagger editor. By facilitating the creation of such metadata, we increase the automated interoperability of Web APIs. This work is done as part of the NIH Commons Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) API Interoperability Working Group.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1007/978-3-319-58451-5_11
Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Keywords
Field
DocType
Web API,Web API description,Web services,Linked data,FAIR principles
Web development,Web API,Metadata,World Wide Web,Information retrieval,Computer science,Linked data,Web modeling,Web navigation,Web application,Web service
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
10250
0302-9743
3
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.68
15
11
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Amrapali Zaveri136824.37
Shima Dastgheib231.02
Chunlei Wu3167.42
Trish Whetzel431.02
Ruben Verborgh5630105.49
Paul Avillach631.36
Gabor Korodi741.71
Raymond Terryn892.22
Kathleen M. Jagodnik9114.29
Pedro Assis1031.02
Michel Dumontier1189893.35