Systems to Democratize and Standardize Access to Web APIs
Today, many websites offer third-party access to their data through web APIs. However, manually encoding URLs with arbitrary endpoints, parameters, authentication handshakes, and pagination, among other things, makes API use challenging and laborious for programmers and untenable for novices. In add...
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Thesis |
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2022
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| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/144560 |
| _version_ | 1811093069432356864 |
|---|---|
| author | Alrashed, Tarfah Abdullah |
| author2 | Karger, David R. |
| author_facet | Karger, David R. Alrashed, Tarfah Abdullah |
| author_sort | Alrashed, Tarfah Abdullah |
| collection | MIT |
| description | Today, many websites offer third-party access to their data through web APIs. However, manually encoding URLs with arbitrary endpoints, parameters, authentication handshakes, and pagination, among other things, makes API use challenging and laborious for programmers and untenable for novices. In addition, each API offers its own idiosyncratic data model, properties, and methods that a new user must learn, even when the sites manage the same common types of information as many others.
In this thesis, I show how working with web APIs can be dramatically simplified by describing these APIs using a simple machine-readable ontology. I present a number of systems that can use these descriptions to access arbitrary APIs on the web. The first system lets users query and download data from any described web API. The second system exposes data behind web APIs as connected objects with standard types, allowing users to create interactive web applications that operate on the data accessible through these APIs. And the last system creates bridges between many heterogeneous types of data from different websites, allowing users to link and interact with data drawn from multiple web APIs simultaneously |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-23T15:38:58Z |
| format | Thesis |
| id | mit-1721.1/144560 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-23T15:38:58Z |
| publishDate | 2022 |
| publisher | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/1445602022-08-30T03:09:06Z Systems to Democratize and Standardize Access to Web APIs Alrashed, Tarfah Abdullah Karger, David R. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Today, many websites offer third-party access to their data through web APIs. However, manually encoding URLs with arbitrary endpoints, parameters, authentication handshakes, and pagination, among other things, makes API use challenging and laborious for programmers and untenable for novices. In addition, each API offers its own idiosyncratic data model, properties, and methods that a new user must learn, even when the sites manage the same common types of information as many others. In this thesis, I show how working with web APIs can be dramatically simplified by describing these APIs using a simple machine-readable ontology. I present a number of systems that can use these descriptions to access arbitrary APIs on the web. The first system lets users query and download data from any described web API. The second system exposes data behind web APIs as connected objects with standard types, allowing users to create interactive web applications that operate on the data accessible through these APIs. And the last system creates bridges between many heterogeneous types of data from different websites, allowing users to link and interact with data drawn from multiple web APIs simultaneously Ph.D. 2022-08-29T15:55:54Z 2022-08-29T15:55:54Z 2022-05 2022-06-21T19:15:11.882Z Thesis https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/144560 In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted Copyright MIT http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/ application/pdf Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| spellingShingle | Alrashed, Tarfah Abdullah Systems to Democratize and Standardize Access to Web APIs |
| title | Systems to Democratize and Standardize Access to Web APIs |
| title_full | Systems to Democratize and Standardize Access to Web APIs |
| title_fullStr | Systems to Democratize and Standardize Access to Web APIs |
| title_full_unstemmed | Systems to Democratize and Standardize Access to Web APIs |
| title_short | Systems to Democratize and Standardize Access to Web APIs |
| title_sort | systems to democratize and standardize access to web apis |
| url | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/144560 |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT alrashedtarfahabdullah systemstodemocratizeandstandardizeaccesstowebapis |