Cross-lingual Web API classification and annotation

Abstract

Recent developments on the Web are marked by the growing support for the Linked Data initiative, which encourages government and public organisations, as well as private institutions, to expose their data on the Web. This results in a plentitude of multi-lingual document collections where the original resources are published in the language, in which they are available. The challenges of multilingualism present on the Semantic Web are also reflected in the context of services on the Web, characterised by the rapid increase in popularity and use of Web APIs, as indicated by the growing number of available APIs and the applications built on top of them. Web APIs are commonly described in plain-text as part of Web pages, following no particular guidelines and conforming to no standards, despite some initial approaches in the area [1, 2]. Therefore, API providers publish descriptions in any language they see fit, making the service discovery and the subsequent processing of the documentation challenging tasks. In this paper, we present a cross-lingual approach that calculates semantic similarity of text to help classify and annotate Web APIs, based on their textual descriptions. Furthermore, we show how our solution can be implemented as part of SWEET [3], which is a tool that enables the semi-automated creation of semantic Web API descriptions. In addition, we demonstrate how the cross-lingual approach can be adopted to support the language-independent discovery of Web APIs.