Abstract
Information access globalisation has resulted in the continuous growing of online available data on the Web, especially open data portals. However, in current open data portals, data is difficult to understand and access. One of the reasons of such difficulty is the lack of suitable mechanisms to extract and learn valuable information from existing open data, such as Web Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) with proper documentation. Actually, in most cases, open data Web APIs documentation is very rudimentary, hard to follow, and sometimes incomplete or even inaccurate. To solve these data management problems, this paper proposes an approach to automatically generate Web API’s documentation which is both machine and user readable. Our approach consists of applying natural language processing techniques to create OpenAPI documentations. This manner, the access to data is facilitated because of the improvement on the comprehension of the APIs, thus promoting the reusability of data. The feasibility of our approach is presented through a case study that shows and compares the benefits of using our OpenAPI documentation process within an open data web API.
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Notes
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A value between 0 and 1 indicating the degree of confidence that the algorithm had when it performed the disambiguation of the term [21].
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The process of splitting a stream of text into more basic units such as words, phrases or tokens (elements with an identified meaning).
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Acknowledgments
This work has been partially funded by the following projects: TIN2016-78103-C2-2-R, PROMETEU/2018/089, RTI2018-094653-B-C22, RTI2018-094649-B-I00, TIN2017-90773-REDT and COST Action CA18231. Furthermore, the author César González-Mora has a contract for predoctoral training with the Generalitat Valenciana and the European Social Fund by the grant ACIF/2019/044.
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González-Mora, C., Barros, C., Garrigós, I., Zubcoff, J., Lloret, E., Mazón, JN. (2020). Applying Natural Language Processing Techniques to Generate Open Data Web APIs Documentation. 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_28
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