Enabling Automatic Discovery and Querying of Web APIs at Web Scale using Linked Data Standards

Abstract

To help in making sense of the ever-increasing number of data sources available on the Web, in this article we tackle the problem of enabling automatic discovery and querying of data sources at Web scale. To pursue this goal, we suggest to (1) provision rich descriptions of data sources and query services thereof, (2) leverage the power of Web search engines to discover data sources, and (3) rely on simple, well-adopted standards that come with extensive tooling. We apply these principles to the concrete case of SPARQL micro-services that aim at querying Web APIs using SPARQL. The proposed solution leverages SPARQL Service Description, SHACL, DCAT, VoID, Schema.org and Hydra to express a rich functional description that allows a software agent to decide whether a microservice can help in carrying out a certain task. This description can be dynamically transformed into a Web page embedding rich markup data. This Web page is both a human-friendly documentation and a machine-readable description that makes it possible for humans and machines alike to discover and invoke SPARQL microservices at Web scale, as if they were just another data source. We report on a prototype implementation that is available on-line for test purposes, and that can be effectively discovered using Google's Dataset Search engine.

Autonomous search in a social and ubiquitous Web

“…In the future, we intend to extend our search engine with the ability to automatically query SPARQL endpoints discovered in the environment at run time. Corese already supports federated SPARQL queries, and we study the automatic discovery and querying of SPARQL endpoints in another work [34]. Our current implementation also does not check the correctness of discovered TDs beyond RDF syntax -for instance, to check if a given TD is usable and corresponds to the Web Thing being described, or if a described device is operational.…”

People Analytics of Semantic Web Human Resource Résumés for Sustainable Talent Acquisition

“…Yes, but not for résumé data. There are many studies that describe data with RDF [42], propose tools to automatically describe data [43], or publish RDF data [44], but not résumé data.…”

Facade-X: An Opinionated Approach to SPARQL Anything

“…grlc decorates the query with execution metadata declared in comments [17]. SPARQL Micro-service [18] provides a framework that, on the basis of API mapping specification, wraps web APIs in SPARQL endpoints and uses JSON-LD profile to translate the JSON responses of the API into RDF. In this paper, we follow a similar, minimalist approach and extend SPARQL by overriding the behaviour of the SERVICE operator.…”