Composing JSON-Based Web APIs

The development of Web APIs has become a discipline that companies have to master to succeed in the Web. The so-called API economy is pushing companies to provide access to their data by means of Web APIs, thus requiring web developers to study and integrate such APIs into their applications. The exchange of data with these APIs is usually performed by using JSON, a schemaless data format easy for computers to parse and use. While JSON data is easy to read, its structure is implicit, thus entailing serious problems when integrating APIs coming from different vendors. Web developers have therefore to understand the domain behind each API and study how they can be composed. We tackle this issue by presenting an approach able to both discover the domain of JSON-based Web APIs and identify composition links among them. Our approach allows developers to easily visualize what is behind APIs and how they can be composed to be used in their applications.