The LRA Workbench for Composing Linked REST APIs

Abstract

The number of Web APIs for accessing information and services is continuously increasing, and yet, no tools exist to automate the process of invoking these APIs and composing their responses, which can be time consuming and error prone. In our previous work, we described LRA (Linked REST APIs) [1], a middleware that enables the automatic composition of REST APIs. Although this automation represents a great opportunity to systematize and improve the quality of the process of using Web APIs, LRA's reliance on SPARQL as the user-interaction model may hinder its adoption. Hence, based upon previous work on Linked Data query systems, in this paper we present a tool that takes advantage of the emergent schema of Web API descriptions, in order to simplify the formulation of LRA-compliant queries.