Model-based Generation of Web Application Programming Interfaces to Access Open Data

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.13052/jwe1540-9589.197810

Keywords:

Web APIs, open data, data access, data reuse

Abstract

In order to facilitate the reusing of open data from open data platforms’ catalogs, Web Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are an important mechanism for reusers. However, there is a lack of suitable Web APIs to access data from open data platforms. Moreover, in most cases, the currently available APIs only allow to access catalog’s metadata or to download entire data resources (i.e. coarse-grain access to data), hampering the reuse of data. Therefore, we propose a model-based approach to automatically generate Web APIs from open data. Our generated Web APIs facilitate the access and reuse of specific data (i.e., providing fine-grain or query-level access to data), which will result in many societal and economic benefits such as transparency and innovation. With this approach we address open data publishers which will be able to include a Web API within their data, but also open data reusers in case of missing APIs. This APIfication process, which means the creation of APIs for every available dataset, is based on automatic, generic and standardised generation mechanisms. The performance and functioning of this approach is validated with different datasets, which successfully generates Web APIs that facilitate the reuse of data.

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Author Biographies

Cesar González-Mora, Department of Languages and Informatics Systems, University of Alicante, Spain

César González-Mora is a PhD student in the Web and Knowledge research group from the Department of Software at University of Alicante, Spain. His research interests include open data, web augmentation, the semantic web and application programming interfaces. His work is funded by a contract with the Generalitat Valenciana of Spain and the European Social Fund for predoctoral training (ACIF/2019/044).

Irene Garrigós, Department of Languages and Informatics Systems, University of Alicante, Spain

Irene Garrigós (PhD.) is Associate Professor in the Department of Software and Computing Systems at the University of Alicante, Spain. Her research interests include open data, web augmentation, web modeling languages, personalization and application programming interfaces. She is the head of the Web and Knowledge research group of the University of Alicante.

Jose Zubcoff, Department of Languages and Informatics Systems, University of Alicante, Spain

José Jacobo Zubcoff (PhD.) presents a wide teaching and research experience in the field of Statistics, Data Mining and its application to Biology. He has more than 100 publications in which he has dealt with obtaining knowledge from a data source. He has done research in various fields of science, both in computing, biology, medicine, education and social sciences. In addition, he has directed and participated in more than 20 competitive public projects financed by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, the Generalitat Valenciana, the University of Alicante and European and private projects, all of them contributing his knowledge about data analysis, data mining and aiming at the democratization of knowledge.

Jose-Norberto Mazón, Department of Languages and Informatics Systems, University of Alicante, Spain

Jose-Norberto Mazón (PhD.) is Associate Professor in the Department of Software and Computing Systems at the University of Alicante, Spain. His research interests include open data, business intelligence in big data scenario, design of data-intensive web applications, smart cities and smart tourism destinations. He is the author of more than hundred scientific publications in international conferences and journals. He is currently Chair of the Torrevieja’s Venue of the University of Alicante.

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Published

2020-12-24

How to Cite

González-Mora, C., Garrigós, I., Zubcoff, J., & Mazón, J.-N. (2020). Model-based Generation of Web Application Programming Interfaces to Access Open Data. Journal of Web Engineering, 19(7-8), 1147–1172. https://doi.org/10.13052/jwe1540-9589.197810

Issue

2020: Vol 19 Iss 7-8

Section

Articles