Systems to Democratize and Standardize Access to Web APIs

Today, many websites offer third-party access to their data through web APIs. However, manually encoding URLs with arbitrary endpoints, parameters, authentication handshakes, and pagination, among other things, makes API use challenging and laborious for programmers and untenable for novices. In addition, each API offers its own idiosyncratic data model, properties, and methods that a new user must learn, even when the sites manage the same common types of information as many others. In this thesis, I show how working with web APIs can be dramatically simplified by describing these APIs using a simple machine-readable ontology. I present a number of systems that can use these descriptions to access arbitrary APIs on the web. The first system lets users query and download data from any described web API. The second system exposes data behind web APIs as connected objects with standard types, allowing users to create interactive web applications that operate on the data accessible through these APIs. And the last system creates bridges between many heterogeneous types of data from different websites, allowing users to link and interact with data drawn from multiple web APIs simultaneously

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2022

Author dc:creator

• Alrashed, Tarfah Abdullah

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Karger, David R.

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
• Copyright MIT

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/144560

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/144560