Systems to Democratize and Standardize Access to Web APIs

Today, many web sites offer third-party access to their data through web APIs. However, manually encoding URLs with arbitrary endpoints, parameters, authentication handshakes, and pagination, among other things, makes API use challenging and laborious for programmers, and untenable for novices. In addition, each API offers its own idiosyncratic data model, properties, and methods that a new user must learn, even when the sites manage the same common types of information as many others. In my research, I show how working with web APIs can be dramatically simplified by describing the APIs using a standardized, machine-readable ontology, and building systems that democratize and standardize access to these APIs. Specifically, I focus on: 1) systems to enable users to query and retrieve data through APIs without programming and 2) systems that standardize access to APIs and simplify the work for users—even non-programmers—to create interactive web applications that operate on data accessible through arbitrary APIs.