Enriching API descriptions by adding API profiles through semantic annotation

In recent years several description tools and formats have been introduced for describing REST Web APIs both in human and machine readable formats. Although these descriptions provide functional information about the APIs (e.g. HTTP methods, URIs, model schema, etc.), the information that qualifies the properties of APIs (e.g. classification of input arguments and response data) is missing. We envisage that providing a complete set of information to the users will facilitate the composition of APIs to fulfil users’ specific needs. This paper analyses the current state of the art in Web API Descriptions and Semantic Annotations to show that although there are solutions with semantic capabilities, most of them fails to add semantic annotations automatically or semi-automatically. Moreover, advanced technical skills are needed to manage semantics and compose different Web APIs, which reduce the number of potential users of such solutions. The goal is to enhance actual API descriptions by creating a simple description format to annotate properties at semantic level to support semi-automatic composition. To achieve this goal, we propose an extension of the Open API Initiative (OAI) specification to create comprehensive descriptions. The approach focuses on the emerging concept of API Profiling to add descriptive information of data semantics by addressing Dublin Core Application Profile (DCAP) guidelines.