Bridging web APIs and linked data with SPARQL micro-services

Abstract

Web APIs are a prominent source of machine-readable information that remains insufficiently connected to the Web of Data. To enable automatic combination of Linked Data (LD) interfaces and Web APIs, we present the SPARQL Micro-Service architecture. A SPARQL micro-service is a lightweight SPARQL endpoint that provides access to a small, resource-centric, virtual graph, while dynamically assigning stable, dereferenceable URIs to Web API resources that do not have URIs in the first place. We believe that the emergence of an ecosystem of SPARQL micro-services could enable LD-based applications to glean pieces of data from a wealth of distributed, scalable and reliable services from independent providers. We describe an experimentation where we dynamically augment biodiversity-related LD resources with data from Flickr, MusicBrainz and the Macauley scientific media library.