A community-based, Graph API framework to integrate and orchestrate cloud-based services

Abstract

The ever-accelerating growth of cloud-based services (CBS) and the prevalence of multi-sided business models have distributed users' data across different data silos that hinder mobile applications development and sustainability. The present paper aims at describing an open framework that abstracts functionality from CBSs through a common Graph, RESTful API, which manages calls among various CBS APIs and syndicates responses under a common standardized format. Combining this conceptual framework with semantically enriched modeling, the implemented platform allows a community of developers to govern, extend and maintain the Graph API and consequently, applications to access a plethora of CBSs through a single point of access. Building on the experience of third-party solutions that mash-up data from different services in their API, the proposed approach goes beyond the state-of-the art through its community-orientation, the API extensibility-by-design and the advanced context awareness and sophistication it provides to developers.