Abstract
REpresentational State Transfer (REST) has become the dominant approach to design Web APIs nowadays, resulting in thousands of public REST Web APIs offering access to a variety of data sources (e.g., open-data initiatives) or advanced functionalities (e.g., geolocation services). Unfortunately, most of these APIs do not come with any specification that developers (and machines) can rely on to automatically understand and integrate them. Instead, most of the time we have to rely on reading its ad-hoc documentation web pages, despite the existence of languages like Swagger or, more recently, OpenAPI that developers could use to formally describe their APIs. In this paper we present an example-driven discovery process that generates model-based OpenAPI specifications for REST Web APIs by using API call examples. A tool implementing our approach and a community-driven repository for the discovered APIs are also presented.
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
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
- 12.
More information about the schema information can be found at http://json-schema.org/latest/json-schema-validation.html.
- 13.
application/x-www-form-urlencoded or multipart/form-data.
- 14.
- 15.
- 16.
- 17.
- 18.
- 19.
- 20.
- 21.
- 22.
- 23.
- 24.
- 25.
- 26.
- 27.
- 28.
- 29.
- 30.
- 31.
References
Brambilla, M., Cabot, J., Wimmer, M.: Model-Driven Software Engineering in Practice. Morgan & Claypool Publishers, San Rafael (2012)
Brambilla, M., Fraternali, P., et al.: The Interaction Flow Modeling Language (IFML). Technical report, Object Management Group (OMG) (2014)
Cabot, J., Gogolla, M.: Object constraint language (OCL): a definitive guide. In: Bernardo, M., Cortellessa, V., Pierantonio, A. (eds.) SFM 2012. LNCS, vol. 7320, pp. 58–90. Springer, Heidelberg (2012). doi:10.1007/978-3-642-30982-3_3
Cánovas Izquierdo, J.L., Cabot, J.: JSONDiscoverer: visualizing the schema lurking behind JSON documents. Knowl.-Based Syst. 103, 52–55 (2016)
Frankle, J., Osera, P.M., Walker, D., Zdancewic, S.: Example-directed synthesis: a type-theoretic interpretation. In: ACM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, pp. 802–815 (2016)
Hadley, M.J.: Web Application Description Language (WADL). Technical report (2006)
Klettke, M., Störl, U., Scherzinger, S., Regensburg, O.: Schema extraction and structural outlier detection for JSON-based NoSQL data stores. In: Conference on Database Systems for Business, Technology, and Web, pp. 425–444 (2015)
López-Fernández, J.J., Cuadrado, J.S., Guerra, E., de Lara, J.: Example-driven meta-model development. Softw. Syst. Model. 14(4), 1323–1347 (2015)
Motahari-Nezhad, H.R., Saint-Paul, R., Casati, F., Benatallah, B.: Event correlation for process discovery from web service interaction logs. Inter. J. Very Large Data Bases 20(3), 417–444 (2011)
Nierstrasz, O., Kobel, M., Girba, T., Lanza, M.: Example-driven reconstruction of software models. In: European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering, pp. 275–286 (2007)
Pautasso, C., Zimmermann, O., Leymann, F.: RESTful web services vs. “Big” web services. In: International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. 805–814 (2008)
Pezoa, F., Reutter, J.L., Suarez, F., Ugarte, M., Vrgoč, D.: Foundations of JSON schema. In: International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. 263–273 (2016)
Quarteroni, S., Brambilla, M., Ceri, S.: A bottom-up, knowledge-aware approach to integrating and querying web data services. ACM Trans. Web 7(4), 19–33 (2013)
Rodriguez Mier, P., Pedrinaci, C., Lama, M., Mucientes, M.: An integrated semantic web service discovery and composition framework. IEEE Trans. Serv. Comput. 9(4), 537–550 (2015)
Ruiz, D.S., Morales, S.F., Molina, J.G.: Inferring versioned schemas from NoSQL databases and its applications. In: International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, pp. 467–480 (2015)
Schmidt, C., Parashar, M.: A peer-to-peer approach to web service discovery. In: International Conference on World Wide Web, pp. 211–229 (2004)
Serrour, B., Gasparotto, D.P., Kheddouci, H., Benatallah, B.: Message correlation and business protocol discovery in service interaction logs. In: Bellahsène, Z., Léonard, M. (eds.) CAiSE 2008. LNCS, vol. 5074, pp. 405–419. Springer, Heidelberg (2008). doi:10.1007/978-3-540-69534-9_31
Sohan, S., Anslow, C., Maurer, F.: SpyREST: automated RESTful API documentation using an HTTP proxy server (N). In: International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, pp. 271–276 (2015)
Acknowledgment
This work has been supported by the Spanish government (TIN2016-75944-R project).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Ed-douibi, H., Cánovas Izquierdo, J.L., Cabot, J. (2017). Example-Driven Web API Specification Discovery. In: Anjorin, A., Espinoza, H. (eds) Modelling Foundations and Applications. ECMFA 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10376. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61482-3_16
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61482-3_16
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-61481-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-61482-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)