Semantic Collaborative Tagging for Web APIs Sharing and Reuse

Sharing and reuse of Web APIs for fast development of Web applications require advanced searching facilities to enable Web designers to find the Web APIs they need. In this paper we describe a Web API semantic collaborative tagging system to be implemented on top of the public ProgrammableWeb Web API repository. The system is designed to be used in a social context: the designers can take actively part in the semantic tagging of Web APIs, thus sharing their experience in developing their own Web applications. Moreover, they can exploit new searching facilities to find out relevant Web APIs according to different search scenarios and reuse them for fast deployment of new applications. To this aim, they rely in an hybrid fashion on the semantic tags and on the collective knowledge derived from past designers’ experiences. Proper matching and ranking metrics are defined and applied during Web API searching.