Semi-automatic acquisition and formal representation of OpenAPI

Abstract

The rapid development of OpenAPIs presents an urgent requirement for effective organization and management. Acquiring and normalizing OpenAPIs information becomes a crucial issue. This paper provides an Internet-oriented method for OpenAPIs acquisition, and gives different solutions for varied protocols based on formal representations of common OpenAPIs. For semi-structural protocol SOAP, OpenAPIs information is parsed automatically, and for unstructured protocol, such as AJAX and REST, after editing the regular expressions according to the styles of web pages, the interfaces information is acquired automatically as well. The experimental results of acquiring 13 OpenAPIs in 6 fields show that our methodology can obtain OpenAPIs correctly and represent them in formal formats; thus, this work lays the foundation of organization and management of OpenAPIs and (semi-) automatic mashup. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.