ScrAPIr: Making Web Data APIs Accessible to End Users
Users have long struggled to extract and repurpose data from websites by laboriously copying or scraping content from web pages. An alternative is to write scripts that pull data through APIs. This provides a cleaner way to access data than scraping; however, APIs are effortful for programmers and n...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
2021
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| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/129996 |
| _version_ | 1810984577424949248 |
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| author | Alrashed, Tarfah Almahmoud, Jumana Zhang, Amy Xian Karger, David R |
| author2 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory |
| author_facet | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Alrashed, Tarfah Almahmoud, Jumana Zhang, Amy Xian Karger, David R |
| author_sort | Alrashed, Tarfah |
| collection | MIT |
| description | Users have long struggled to extract and repurpose data from websites by laboriously copying or scraping content from web pages. An alternative is to write scripts that pull data through APIs. This provides a cleaner way to access data than scraping; however, APIs are effortful for programmers and nigh-impossible for non-programmers to use. In this work, we empower users to access APIs without programming. We evolve a schema for declaratively specifying how to interact with a data API. We then develop ScrAPIr: a standard query GUI that enables users to fetch data through any API for which a specification exists, and a second GUI that lets users author and share the specification for a given API. From a lab evaluation, we find that even non-programmers can access APIs using ScrAPIr, while programmers can access APIs 3.8 times faster on average using ScrAPIr than using programming. |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-23T11:04:38Z |
| format | Article |
| id | mit-1721.1/129996 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-23T11:04:38Z |
| publishDate | 2021 |
| publisher | Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/1299962022-10-01T01:03:28Z ScrAPIr: Making Web Data APIs Accessible to End Users Alrashed, Tarfah Almahmoud, Jumana Zhang, Amy Xian Karger, David R Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Users have long struggled to extract and repurpose data from websites by laboriously copying or scraping content from web pages. An alternative is to write scripts that pull data through APIs. This provides a cleaner way to access data than scraping; however, APIs are effortful for programmers and nigh-impossible for non-programmers to use. In this work, we empower users to access APIs without programming. We evolve a schema for declaratively specifying how to interact with a data API. We then develop ScrAPIr: a standard query GUI that enables users to fetch data through any API for which a specification exists, and a second GUI that lets users author and share the specification for a given API. From a lab evaluation, we find that even non-programmers can access APIs using ScrAPIr, while programmers can access APIs 3.8 times faster on average using ScrAPIr than using programming. 2021-02-24T20:27:14Z 2021-02-24T20:27:14Z 2020-04 2020-12-23T15:53:34Z Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/ConferencePaper 9781450367080 https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/129996 Alrashed, Tarfah et al. "ScrAPIr: Making Web Data APIs Accessible to End Users." Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, April 2020, Honolulu, Hawaii, Association for Computing Machinery, April 2020. © 2020 The Authors en http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376691 Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ application/pdf Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) MIT web domain |
| spellingShingle | Alrashed, Tarfah Almahmoud, Jumana Zhang, Amy Xian Karger, David R ScrAPIr: Making Web Data APIs Accessible to End Users |
| title | ScrAPIr: Making Web Data APIs Accessible to End Users |
| title_full | ScrAPIr: Making Web Data APIs Accessible to End Users |
| title_fullStr | ScrAPIr: Making Web Data APIs Accessible to End Users |
| title_full_unstemmed | ScrAPIr: Making Web Data APIs Accessible to End Users |
| title_short | ScrAPIr: Making Web Data APIs Accessible to End Users |
| title_sort | scrapir making web data apis accessible to end users |
| url | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/129996 |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT alrashedtarfah scrapirmakingwebdataapisaccessibletoendusers AT almahmoudjumana scrapirmakingwebdataapisaccessibletoendusers AT zhangamyxian scrapirmakingwebdataapisaccessibletoendusers AT kargerdavidr scrapirmakingwebdataapisaccessibletoendusers |