IEEE Transactions on Services Computing | 2019
Test-Oriented RESTful Service Discovery with Semantic Interface Compatibility
Abstract
Developing the means by which to discover RESTful Web APIs/services is crucial to the further development of this technology. Unfortunately, existing search engines for RESTful Web APIs/services provide only keyword-based or tag-based search functions. A failure to take into account the semantics and/or characteristics (e.g., their interface compatibility) greatly hampers the ability to find suitable APIs/services. In this study, we propose a novel approach to the discovery of RESTful Web API/services, referred to as Test-Oriented API Search with Semantic Interface Compatibility (TASSIC). This scheme involves expanding the terms of Web API/service documents based on DBpedia and WordNet. Unsuitable APIs/services are then filtered out using a four-step process, as follows: 1) calculation of semantic similarity between a set of candidate APIs/services and a user query, 2) analysis of interface compatibility between candidate APIs/services using the Hungarian Algorithm, 3) invocation of candidate APIs/services to verify functionality and availability, and 4) analysis of similarity between the actual response of the candidate services and the expected response specified in the user query. Experiment results demonstrate the efficacy of TASSIC, the accuracy of which is superior to that of existing methods.