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European Conference on Modelling Foundations and Applications

ECMFA 2017: Modelling Foundations and Applications pp 267–284Cite as

Example-Driven Web API Specification Discovery

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 10376))

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.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://swagger.io/.

  2. 2.

    https://apiblueprint.org/.

  3. 3.

    http://raml.org/.

  4. 4.

    https://openapis.org.

  5. 5.

    https://apimatic.io/.

  6. 6.

    http://swagger.io/swagger-ui/.

  7. 7.

    https://www.runscope.com/.

  8. 8.

    https://github.com/OAI/OpenAPI-Specification/blob/master/schemas/v2.0/schema.json.

  9. 9.

    https://github.com/OAI/OpenAPI-Specification/blob/master/schemas/v2.0/schema.json.

  10. 10.

    https://github.com/swagger-api/swagger-core.

  11. 11.

    https://github.com/SOM-Research/APIDiscoverer/tree/master/metamodel.

  12. 12.

    More information about the schema information can be found at http://json-schema.org/latest/json-schema-validation.html.

  13. 13.

    application/x-www-form-urlencoded or multipart/form-data.

  14. 14.

    https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6901.

  15. 15.

    http://www.refugerestrooms.org/api/docs/.

  16. 16.

    http://www.omdbapi.com/.

  17. 17.

    https://graphhopper.com/.

  18. 18.

    http://passwordutility.net.

  19. 19.

    http://swagger.io/tools/.

  20. 20.

    https://lucybot.com/.

  21. 21.

    http://rebilly.github.io/ReDoc/.

  22. 22.

    https://studio.restlet.com.

  23. 23.

    http://stoplight.io/platform/design/.

  24. 24.

    https://github.com/SOM-Research/APIDiscoverer.

  25. 25.

    http://www.primefaces.org.

  26. 26.

    http://unirest.io.

  27. 27.

    http://www.eclipse.org/modeling/emf/.

  28. 28.

    https://market.mashape.com.

  29. 29.

    http://docs.seleniumhq.org/projects/webdriver/.

  30. 30.

    https://github.com/SOM-Research/hapi.

  31. 31.

    https://apis.guru/api-doc/ and http://www.apis.io/apiDoc.

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Acknowledgment

This work has been supported by the Spanish government (TIN2016-75944-R project).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. UOC, Barcelona, Spain

    Hamza Ed-douibi, Javier Luis Cánovas Izquierdo & Jordi Cabot

  2. ICREA, Barcelona, Spain

    Jordi Cabot

Authors
  1. Hamza Ed-douibi
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  2. Javier Luis Cánovas Izquierdo
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  3. Jordi Cabot
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hamza Ed-douibi .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Paderborn, Paderborn, Germany

    Anthony Anjorin

  2. Tecnalia Research and Innovation, Derio, Spain

    Huáscar Espinoza

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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

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61482-3_16

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-61481-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-61482-3

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