Open Geodata Reuse: Towards Natural Language Interfaces to Web APIs

Open Government datasets have been flooding the Web recently, and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are key to the development of services on top of these datasets. An issue of current APIs worldwide is that their learnability is limited. This work has explored the potential of querying APIs using natural language terms to mitigate that issue. A user study with 20 participants has demonstrated that a natural-language-based, along with an order-agnostic approach to API design can produce easily learnable APIs for both novice and experienced API users. These insights can pave the way for a paradigm change on Web-API design for open geodata retrieval and beyond.