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OBA: An Ontology-Based Framework for Creating REST APIs for Knowledge Graphs

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The Semantic Web – ISWC 2020 (ISWC 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12507))

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Abstract

In recent years, Semantic Web technologies have been increasingly adopted by researchers, industry and public institutions to describe and link data on the Web, create web annotations and consume large knowledge graphs like Wikidata and DBpedia. However, there is still a knowledge gap between ontology engineers, who design, populate and create knowledge graphs; and web developers, who need to understand, access and query these knowledge graphs but are not familiar with ontologies, RDF or SPARQL. In this paper we describe the Ontology-Based APIs framework (OBA), our approach to automatically create REST APIs from ontologies while following RESTful API best practices. Given an ontology (or ontology network) OBA uses standard technologies familiar to web developers (OpenAPI Specification, JSON) and combines them with W3C standards (OWL, JSON-LD frames and SPARQL) to create maintainable APIs with documentation, units tests, automated validation of resources and clients (in Python, Javascript, etc.) for non Semantic Web experts to access the contents of a target knowledge graph. We showcase OBA with three examples that illustrate the capabilities of the framework for different ontologies.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://lod-cloud.net/.

  2. 2.

    https://developers.google.com/knowledge-graph.

  3. 3.

    https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/microsoft-academic-graph/.

  4. 4.

    http://spec.openapis.org/oas/v3.0.3.

  5. 5.

    https://www.w3.org/2004/03/trix/.

  6. 6.

    https://github.com/OAI/OpenAPI-Specification.

  7. 7.

    http://spec.openapis.org/oas/v3.0.3.

  8. 8.

    https://github.com/OAI/OpenAPI-Specification/blob/master/IMPLEMENTATIONS.md.

  9. 9.

    Alternatively, may be used to allow developers to post their own ids.

  10. 10.

    We follow the best practices for RESTful API design: paths are in non-capital letters and always in plural (e.g., /regions, /persons, etc.).

  11. 11.

    https://oba.readthedocs.io/en/latest/mapping/.

  12. 12.

    https://yaml.org/.

  13. 13.

    https://editor.swagger.io/.

  14. 14.

    https://github.com/KnowledgeCaptureAndDiscovery/OBA_sparql/.

  15. 15.

    https://github.com/OpenAPITools/openapi-generator.

  16. 16.

    https://oba.readthedocs.io/en/latest/server/.

  17. 17.

    https://firebase.google.com/docs/auth/.

  18. 18.

    https://oauth.net/2/.

  19. 19.

    https://oba.readthedocs.io/en/latest/adding_custom_queries/.

  20. 20.

    https://pythonhosted.org/Flask-Testing/.

  21. 21.

    https://flask.palletsprojects.com/en/1.1.x/.

  22. 22.

    https://oba.readthedocs.io/en/latest/test/.

  23. 23.

    https://model-catalog-python-api-client.readthedocs.io/en/latest/.

  24. 24.

    https://oba.readthedocs.io/en/latest/examples/.

  25. 25.

    https://wiki.dbpedia.org/services-resources/ontology.

  26. 26.

    https://github.com/sirspock/dbpedia_api_client.

  27. 27.

    https://github.com/sirspock/dbpedia_example/.

  28. 28.

    https://model-catalog-python-api-client.readthedocs.io/en/latest/endpoints/.

  29. 29.

    https://models.mint.isi.edu.

  30. 30.

    https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2015Jan/0087.html.

  31. 31.

    https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2018Nov/0036.html.

  32. 32.

    https://github.com/dbooth-boston/EasierRDF.

  33. 33.

    https://oba.readthedocs.io/en/latest/quickstart/.

  34. 34.

    http://marmotta.apache.org/.

  35. 35.

    https://www.trellisldp.org/about.html.

  36. 36.

    https://atomgraph.github.io/Linked-Data-Templates/.

  37. 37.

    https://github.com/oeg-upm/r4r.

  38. 38.

    https://github.com/opencitations/ramose.

  39. 39.

    https://github.com/usc-isi-i2/sparql-jsonld.

  40. 40.

    https://graphql.org/.

  41. 41.

    https://www.stardog.com/categories/graphql/.

  42. 42.

    https://github.com/hammar/owl2oas.

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency with award W911NF-18-1-0027 and the National Science Foundation with award ICER-1440323. The authors would like to thank Yolanda Gil, Paola Espinoza, Carlos Badenes, Oscar Corcho, Karl Hammar and the ISWC anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and feedback.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA

    Daniel Garijo & Maximiliano Osorio

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  1. Daniel Garijo
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  2. Maximiliano Osorio
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Correspondence to Daniel Garijo .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Jeff Z. Pan

  2. University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

    Valentina Tamma

  3. University of Bari, Bari, Italy

    Claudia d’Amato

  4. University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Krzysztof Janowicz

  5. California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA, USA

    Bo Fu

  6. Vienna University of Economics and Business, Vienna, Austria

    Axel Polleres

  7. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, USA

    Oshani Seneviratne

  8. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Lalana Kagal

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Garijo, D., Osorio, M. (2020). OBA: An Ontology-Based Framework for Creating REST APIs for Knowledge Graphs. In: Pan, J.Z., et al. The Semantic Web – ISWC 2020. ISWC 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12507. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62466-8_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62466-8_4

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-62466-8

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