A Lightweight Model for Publishing and Sharing Linked Web APIs

The web of Linked Data has been proposed in the last years in order to create a global data graph, that spans data sources, connected by RDF links, and enables the discovery of new resources. Recently, Web APIs have been more and more used to access documents and metadata from the web of Linked Data and to easily compose new applications called web mashups. In this paper, we describe a lightweight model for publishing and sharing Web APIs and mashups on the web of Linked Data. The model has been designed (a) to support providers who publish new Web APIs used for accessing the web of Linked Data, (b) to support the web designer who aims at exploring and selecting available Web APIs for building or maintaining a web mashup, and (c) to make the mashup itself available on top of the web of Linked Data. The functional architecture of a platform based on the model is also introduced.