SPARQL Micro-Services: Lightweight Integration of Web APIs and Linked Data
Abstract
Web APIs are a prominent source of machine-readable information. We hypothesize that harnessing the Semantic Web standards to enable automatic combination of Linked Data and non-RDF Web APIs data could trigger novel cross-fertilization scenarios. To achieve this goal, we define the SPARQL Micro-Service architecture. A SPARQL micro-service is a lightweight, task-specific SPARQL endpoint that provides access to a small, resource-centric, virtual graph, while dynamically assigning dereferenceable URIs to Web API resources that do not have URIs beforehand. The graph is delineated by the Web API service being wrapped, the arguments passed to this service, and the restricted types of RDF triples that this SPARQL micro-service is designed to spawn. In this context, we argue that full SPARQL expressiveness can be supported efficiently without jeopardizing servers availability. Eventually, we believe that an ecosystem of SPARQL micro-services could emerge from independent service providers, enabling Linked Data-based applications to glean pieces of data from a wealth of distributed, scalable and reliable services. We describe an experimentation where we dynamically augment biodiversity-related Linked Data with data from Flickr, MusicBrainz and the Macauley scientific media library.
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