Linked REST APIs: A Middleware for Semantic REST API Integration

Over the last decade, an exponentially increasing number of REST services have been providing a simple and straightforward syntax for accessing rich data resources. To use these services, however, developers have to understand "information-use contracts" specified in natural language, and, to build applications that benefit from multiple existing services they have to map the underlying resource schemas in their code. This process is difficult and error-prone, especially as the number and overlap of the underlying services increases, and the mappings become opaque, difficult to maintain, and practically impossible to reuse. The more recent advent of the Linked Data formalisms can offer a solution to the challenge. In this paper, we propose a conceptual framework for REST-service integration based on Linked Data models. In this framework, the data exposed by REST services is mapped to Linked Data schemas, based on these descriptions, we have developed a middleware that can automatically compose API calls to respond to data queries (in SPARQL). Furthermore, we have developed a RDF model for characterizing the access-control protocols of these APIs and the quality of the data they expose, so that our middleware can develop "legal" compositions with desired qualities. We report our experience with the implementation of a prototype that demonstrates the usefulness of our framework in the context of a research-data management application.