A Universal Application Programming Interface to Access and Reuse Linked Open Data

• Published in: Web Engineering pp. 556 - 560
• Main Authors: González-Mora, César, Garrigós, Irene, Zubcoff, Jose
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Cham Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Data reuse; Linked Open Data; Query builder; SPARQL; Universal API
• ISBN: 9783030505776; 3030505774
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-50578-3_44

In this paper we present a Universal API in order to facilitate the access and reuse of Linked Open Data (LOD). Nowadays, it is difficult to explore heterogeneous data by structured query languages, especially for end users and developers unfamiliar with SPARQL and RDF. Our solution proposes a universal access to the LOD scenario through a common interface, which automatically generates SPARQL queries to access data from any dataset available online. Moreover, the results given by this Universal API are restructured and parsed to well-known formats easily understandable by the majority of developers, such as JSON or CSV. In order to easily use the Web API proposed, there is a Web interface which guides users to get the desired data, providing appropriate documentation to facilitate the search of relevant information. The main innovation of this approach is offering programmatic access to Linked Open Data through the automatic building of SPARQL queries without requiring any prior knowledge of the data and the Semantic Web environment.