Open Data Consumption Through the Generation of Disposable Web APIs

The ever-growing amount of information in today’s world has led to the publication of more and more open data, i.e., that which is available in a free and reusable manner, on the Web. Open data is considered highly valuable in situational scenarios, in which thematic data is required for a short life cycle by a small group of consumers with specific needs. In this context, data consumers (developers or data scientists) need mechanisms with which to easily assess whether the data is adequate for their purpose. SPARQL endpoints have become very useful for the consumption of open data, but we argue that its steep learning curve hampers open data reuse in situational scenarios. In order to overcome this pitfall, in this paper, we coin the term disposable Web APIs as an alternative mechanism for the consumption of open data in situational scenarios. Disposable Web APIs are created on-the-fly to be used temporarily by a user to consume open data. In this paper we specifically describe an approach with which to leverage semantic information from data sources so as to automatically generate easy-to-use disposable Web APIs that can be used to access open data in a situational scenario, thus avoiding the complexity and learning curve of SPARQL and the effort of manually processing the data. We have conducted several experiments to discover whether non-experienced users find it easier to use our disposable Web API or a SPARQL endpoint to access open data. The results of the experiments led us to conclude that, in a situational scenario, it is easier and faster to use the Web API than the corresponding SPARQL endpoint in order to consume open data.