Extracting models from Web API documentation

In order to develop web mashups, designers need an in-depth understanding of each Web API they are using. However, Web API documentation is rather heterogeneous, represented by big HTML files or collection of files in which it is difficult to identify elements such as API methods and how they can be invoked. Models have been widely recognized as first-citizen artifacts for documenting software applications, abstracting from implementation details, thus becoming good candidates to raise the level of automation of web mashup development. In this paper we present an approach for extracting models from Web API documentation. Our contributions are (i) a metamodel for standardizing the information extracted from Web APIs documentation; and (ii) a method for the extraction of models by parsing HTML files containing the Web API documentation, discovering useful data, and automatically generating the corresponding models (that conform to the defined metamodel).