The LRA Workbench: an IDE for efficient REST API composition through linked metadata

The number of Web APIs for accessing information and services is continuously increasing, and yet, no tools exist to automate the time-consuming and error-prone process of invoking those APIs and composing their responses. The recent emergence of widely-adopted, standardized, Web-API description for...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of big data Vol. 8; no. 1; pp. 1 - 26
Main Authors: Serrano, Diego, Stroulia, Eleni
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Cham Springer International Publishing 14.09.2021
Springer Nature B.V
SpringerOpen
Subjects:
Adoption of innovations
Application programming interface
Automation
Big Data
Communications Engineering
Computational Science and Engineering
Computer Science
Data
Data integration
Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery
Database Management
Human-computer interaction
Information services
Information Storage and Retrieval
Intelligent web services and Semantic Web
Interaction models
Mathematical Applications in Computer Science
Metadata
Networks
Quality of service
Queries
Service-oriented architecture
Services integration framework
Specifications
Workbenches
Intelligent web services and Semantic Web
Service-oriented architecture
Services integration framework
ISSN:2196-1115, 2196-1115
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The number of Web APIs for accessing information and services is continuously increasing, and yet, no tools exist to automate the time-consuming and error-prone process of invoking those APIs and composing their responses. The recent emergence of widely-adopted, standardized, Web-API description formats and the development of Linked Data technologies for data integration have motivated our work on the LRA (Linked REST APIs) methodology [ 1 , 2 ]. LRA relies on RDF service specifications to automate the development process around the usage of Web APIs. This automation represents a great opportunity to systematize and improve the quality of service-oriented application development. However, LRA’s reliance on SPARQL as the user-interaction model may hinder its adoption, because it requires developers to learn the intricacies of the unconventional graph data model and its associated datasets. In this paper we have developed the LRA Workbench ( L R A Wbench ), which takes advantage of the emergent schema of Web-API specifications, in order to simplify the formulation of LRA-compliant SPARQL queries. Our empirical evaluation of the L R A Wbench  usability demonstrates that our tool significantly improves the performance of developers formulating SPARQL queries for LRA. A subsequent study on the effectiveness of the L R A Wbench  demonstrated that developers using LRA tend to produce code with considerable better structural complexity, in less time, than developers manually composing APIs.
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ISSN:2196-1115
2196-1115
DOI:10.1186/s40537-021-00504-z