Abstract
Based on semantically annotated Web APIs, automatic Web API composition can be implemented easily. The operation can greatly improve efficiency of building a software system. However, in real world, semantic annotation for Web APIs will encounter various difficulties, because of their distribution and function diversity, such as disunited API description formats, response result with complex structure, shortage of business domain ontologies, semantic conflicts among distributed knowledge, and so on. To solve these difficulties, we propose a JSON-LD based Web API semantic annotation approach (JWASA). JWASA can assist professional developers to semi-automatically complete semantic annotation of Web APIs. A common Web API description ontology is firstly defined, including necessary vocabularies about invocation information, functional semantics, and non-functional features. Then, JWASA automatically converts a Web API description into a document in an united JSON format, and assist developers to semi-automatically embed semantic information of crucial elements of the API by means of a lightweight Linked Data format JSON-LD. Meanwhile, a semantic annotation specification is proposed to deal with various complex situations in Web API description, e.g: too many response parameters, no request parameters, etc. In addition, to improve efficiency of annotation, JWASA provides some extra operations, including automatic new ontology or vocabulary creation, automatic functional semantics extraction etc. Also, JWASA provides semi-automatically bridge rule generation algorithm, which can infer implied relationships among vocabularies (e.g: sub-class, super-class, equality). JWASA focuses on the semantic annotation of functionality of Web APIs, and can create effective semantic Web APIs for future API automatic composition. We implement a prototype system and carry out a series of experiments to evaluate JWASA on real Web APIs crawled from Internet. Experiments show that our approach is effective and efficient.
Highlights
U NDER micro service architecture [1], a software system can be quickly constructed by integrating various existing Web APIs from different providers
Web APIs are described by existing API specifications with a concise format, e.g: JSON, and custom semantic annotation formats are proposed to embed semantic information in original description documents [8]–[10]
To solve the problems above, we propose a JSON-LD [13] based Web API semantic annotation approach (JWASA)
Summary
U NDER micro service architecture [1], a software system can be quickly constructed by integrating various existing Web APIs from different providers. Web APIs are described by existing API specifications with a concise format, e.g: JSON, and custom semantic annotation formats are proposed to embed semantic information in original description documents [8]–[10]. To solve the problems above, we propose a JSON-LD [13] based Web API semantic annotation approach (JWASA) It converts a Web API description document in informal natural language into a document in an united JSON format, and can assist developers in semantically annotating elements in the JSON document according to JSON-LD format. 2) A semi-automatic JSON-LD based Web API semantic annotation approach is proposed, where a semantic annotation specification is designed and some efficient assist operations are provided including automatic ontology generation, bridge rule generation and functional semantics extraction.
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