Services and Applications over Linked APIs and Data

The challenge

The World Wide Web has significantly evolved during the past 25 years, developing from a collection of a few interlinked static pages to a global ubiquitous platform for sharing, searching, and browsing dynamic and customisable content, in a variety of different media formats. Future developments bring the promise of a higher level of automation, distributed search and the use of intelligent personal agents1, which autonomously perform tasks on behalf of the user. The foundation for these trends is laid by the ever growing number of users and web sites, the increasing data volumes, but also by the use and popularity of Linked Data and Web APIs. Unfortunately, despite some initial efforts2,3 and progress towards integrated use, these two technologies remain mostly disjunct in terms of developing solutions and applications. To this purpose, SALAD aims to explore the possibilities of facilitating a better fusion of Web APIs and Linked Data, thus enabling the harvesting and provisioning of data through applications and services on the Web. In particular, we focus on investigating how both static and dynamic resources (for example, sensor data or streams), exposed via interfaces on the Web, can be used together with semantic data, as means for enabling a shared use and providing a basis for developing rich applications.

The workshop

With this workshop, we aim to discover new ways to embrace the opportunities that Web APIs offer in terms of data consumption, processing, and provisioning but also to investigate the possibilities of integrating them more closely with Linked Data. We want to challenge researchers towards developing integrated description and implementation approaches through both paper submissions and interactive on-site discussion and dialog. In particular we are looking for description approaches, formal models, implementation solutions, use cases, and applications that support a more automated and unified Web API and Linked Data use.

The goals

The main goal of this workshop is to explore the possibilities of enabling a more integrated and automated use of Web APIs, given the context of the growing importance of Linked Data and applications, benefiting from the available resources. Relevant topics include:

• frameworks, methods, models, and formats for describing Web APIs
• design of distributed systems based on semantic API technology
• overcoming performance issues in the interaction with APIs
• development of intelligent and generic Web API clients
• supporting WoT development with Web APIs and Linked Data
• designing applications by connecting Web APIs and Linked Data for reading and writing
• address scalability issues while dealing with large data volumes
• business models for Linked Data and Web API

The above list is not exhaustive and we, therefore, actively encourage participants to be creative. A final goal is to provide future initiatives with the devised ideas and visions to stimulate innovation in this research area.

The dates

Submission

March 4, 2016 March 13, 2016

Notification

April 1, 2016

Camera-ready

May 10, 2016

Workshop

May 29th, 2016