Model-based Generation of Web Application Programming Interfaces to Access Open Data

Abstract

In order to facilitate the reusing of open data from open data platforms’ catalogs, Web Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are an important mechanism for reusers. However, there is a lack of suitable Web APIs to access data from open data platforms. Moreover, in most cases, the currently available APIs only allow to access catalog’s metadata or to download entire data resources (i.e. coarse-grain access to data), hampering the reuse of data. Therefore, we propose a model-based approach to automatically generate Web APIs from open data. Our generated Web APIs facilitate the access and reuse of specific data (i.e., providing fine-grain or query-level access to data), which will result in many societal and economic benefits such as transparency and innovation. With this approach we address open data publishers which will be able to include a Web API within their data, but also open data reusers in case of missing APIs. This APIfication process, which means the creation of APIs for every available dataset, is based on automatic, generic and standardised generation mechanisms. The performance and functioning of this approach is validated with different datasets, which successfully generates Web APIs that facilitate the reuse of data.