A classification of web API selection solutions over the linked web

Abstract

Effective support to web designers for fast development of web applications starting from third-party components or Web APIs requires to take into account different aspects. Among them, functional and non functional Web API features and suggestions coming from other web designers who faced similar problems and can share the solutions they adopted. In this paper, we propose a new model that brings together all these aspects to support Web API selection for building web mashups. We exploited the model to provide a map of existing Web API recommendation strategies, as well as to design new solutions based on the combined modeling of different Web API descriptive aspects. Since these aspects are extracted from different sources (such as Web API public repositories and social networks of web mashup developers), our model is built by relying on the Linked Data principles.