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Ruben Verborgh

Declaratively Describing Responses of Hypermedia-Driven Web APIs

Ruben Taelman and Ruben Verborgh

While humans browse the Web by following links, these hypermedia links can also be used by machines for browsing. While efforts such as Hydra semantically describe the hypermedia controls on Web interfaces to enable smarter interface-agnostic clients, they are largely limited to the input parameters to interfaces, and clients therefore do not know what response to expect from these interfaces. In order to convey such expectations, interfaces need to declaratively describe the response structure of their parameterized hypermedia controls. We therefore explored techniques to represent this parameterized response structure in a generic but expressive way. In this work, we discuss four different approaches for declaring a response structure, and we compare them based on a model that we introduce. Based on this model, we conclude that a SHACL shape-based approach can be used for declaring such a parameterized response structure, as it conforms to the REST architectural style that has helped shape the Web into its current form.

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Published in 2017 in Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Knowledge Capture.

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Cite this article easily using its BibTeX entry: 

@inproceedings{taelman_kcap_2017,
  author = {Taelman, Ruben and Verborgh, Ruben},
  title = {Declaratively Describing Responses of Hypermedia-Driven {Web APIs}},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Knowledge Capture},
  year = 2017,
  month = dec,
  pages = {34:1--34:4},
  publisher = {ACM},
  isbn = {978-1-4503-5553-7},
  doi = {10.1145/3148011.3154467},
  url = {https://dl.acm.org/authorize?N42801},
}

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ACM
Ruben Taelman and Ruben Verborgh. 2017. Declaratively Describing Responses of Hypermedia-Driven Web APIs. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Knowledge Capture, ACM, 34:1–34:4.
APA
Taelman, R., & Verborgh, R. (2017). Declaratively Describing Responses of Hypermedia-Driven Web APIs. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Knowledge Capture, 34:1–34:4.
IEEE
R. Taelman and R. Verborgh, “Declaratively Describing Responses of Hypermedia-Driven Web APIs,” in Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Knowledge Capture, 2017, pp. 34:1–34:4.
LNCS
Taelman, R., Verborgh, R.: Declaratively Describing Responses of Hypermedia-Driven Web APIs. In: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Knowledge Capture. pp. 34:1–34:4. ACM (2017).
MLA
Taelman, Ruben, and Ruben Verborgh. “Declaratively Describing Responses of Hypermedia-Driven Web APIs.” Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Knowledge Capture, ACM, 2017, pp. 34:1–34:4.

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