[Profile picture of Ruben Verborgh]

Ruben Verborgh

smartAPI: Towards a More Intelligent Network of Web APIs

Amrapali Zaveri, Shima Dastgheib, Trish Whetzel, Ruben Verborgh, Paul Avillach, Gabor Korodi, Raymond Terryn, Kathleen Jagodnik, Pedro Assis, Chunlei Wu, and Michel Dumontier

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.

BibTeX other citation formats

Published in 2017 in Proceedings of the 14th ESWC.

Keywords:

Read this article online

Cite this article in your work

Cite this article easily using its BibTeX entry: 

@inproceedings{zaveri_eswc_2017,
  author = {Zaveri, Amrapali and Dastgheib, Shima and Whetzel, Trish and Verborgh, Ruben and Avillach, Paul and Korodi, Gabor and Terryn, Raymond and Jagodnik, Kathleen and Assis, Pedro and Wu, Chunlei and Dumontier, Michel},
  title = {{smartAPI:} Towards a More Intelligent Network of {Web~APIs}},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 14th ESWC},
  year = 2017,
  month = may,
  series = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science},
  volume = 10250,
  editor = {Blomqvist, Eva and Maynard, Diana and Gangemi, Aldo and Hoekstra, Rinke and Hitzler, Pascal and Hartig, Olaf},
  publisher = {Springer},
  pages = {154--169},
  isbn = {978-3-319-58451-5},
  doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-58451-5_11},
}

Alternatively, pick a reference of your choice below:

ACM
Amrapali Zaveri, Shima Dastgheib, Trish Whetzel, Ruben Verborgh, Paul Avillach, Gabor Korodi, Raymond Terryn, Kathleen Jagodnik, Pedro Assis, Chunlei Wu, and Michel Dumontier. 2017. smartAPI: Towards a More Intelligent Network of Web APIs. In Proceedings of the 14th ESWC (Lecture Notes in Computer Science), Springer, 154–169.
APA
Zaveri, A., Dastgheib, S., Whetzel, T., Verborgh, R., Avillach, P., Korodi, G., Terryn, R., Jagodnik, K., Assis, P., Wu, C., & Dumontier, M. (2017). smartAPI: Towards a More Intelligent Network of Web APIs. In E. Blomqvist, D. Maynard, A. Gangemi, R. Hoekstra, P. Hitzler, & O. Hartig (Eds.), Proceedings of the 14th ESWC (Vol. 10250, pp. 154–169). Springer.
IEEE
A. Zaveri et al., “smartAPI: Towards a More Intelligent Network of Web APIs,” in Proceedings of the 14th ESWC, 2017, vol. 10250, pp. 154–169.
LNCS
Zaveri, A., Dastgheib, S., Whetzel, T., Verborgh, R., Avillach, P., Korodi, G., Terryn, R., Jagodnik, K., Assis, P., Wu, C., Dumontier, M.: smartAPI: Towards a More Intelligent Network of Web APIs. In: Blomqvist, E., Maynard, D., Gangemi, A., Hoekstra, R., Hitzler, P., and Hartig, O. (eds.) Proceedings of the 14th ESWC. pp. 154–169. Springer (2017).
MLA
Zaveri, Amrapali, et al. “SmartAPI: Towards a More Intelligent Network of Web APIs.” Proceedings of the 14th ESWC, edited by Eva Blomqvist et al., vol. 10250, Springer, 2017, pp. 154–69.

Discuss this article