Abstract
REST APIs are an essential building block in many Web applications. The lack of a standard machine-readable format to describe these REST APIs triggered the creation of several specification languages to formally define REST APIs, with the OpenAPI specification currently taking the lead. OpenAPI definitions are consumed by a growing ecosystem of tools aimed at automating tasks such as generating server/client SDKs and API documentations. However, current OpenAPI documentation tools mostly provide simple descriptive Web pages enumerating all the API operations and corresponding parameters, but do not offer interactive capabilities to help navigate the API and ask relevant information. Therefore, learning how to use an API and how its different parts are interrelated still requires a considerable time investment. To overcome this situation we present our OpenAPI Bot, a chatbot able to read an OpenAPI definition for you and answer the questions you may have about it.
Work supported by the Spanish government (TIN2016-75944-R project).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Complete sources for the example available at https://github.com/opendata-for-all/openapi-bot/.
- 3.
References
Cai, L., et al.: AnswerBot: an answer summary generation tool based on stack overflow. In: Proceedings of the ESEC/FSE, pp. 1134–1138 (2019)
Daniel, G., Cabot, J., Deruelle, L., Derras, M.: Xatkit: a multimodal low-code chatbot development framework. IEEE Access 8, 15332–15346 (2020)
Ed-douibi, H., Cánovas Izquierdo, J., Bordeleau, F., Cabot, J.: WAPIml: towards a modeling infrastructure for Web APIs. In: International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems Companion, pp. 748–752 (2019)
Tian, Y., Thung, F., Sharma, A., Lo, D.: APIBot: question answering bot for API documentation. In: International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, pp. 153–158 (2017)
Vaziri, M., Mandel, L., Shinnar, A., Siméon, J., Hirzel, M.: Generating Chat Bots from Web API specifications. In: Proceedings of the Onward!, pp. 44–57 (2017)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Ed-Douibi, H., Daniel, G., Cabot, J. (2020). OpenAPI Bot: A Chatbot to Help You Understand REST APIs. In: Bielikova, M., Mikkonen, T., Pautasso, C. (eds) Web Engineering. ICWE 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12128. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50578-3_40
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50578-3_40
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-50577-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-50578-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)