Towards a folksonomy of Web APIs

Folksonomies are powerful tools for the Web 2.0 to provide classifications “emerging from the bottom”, performed by users who collaboratively assign tags and annotate shared resources. In this paper, we adapt the notion of folksonomy to the collaborative tagging of Web APIs, that is, software components made available by third parties through web interfaces in order to aggregate them and compose web mashups. In this context, we will motivate the use of this tool and we will discuss the differences to model the mashup space as a folksonomy with respect to the traditional use of folksonomies in the Web 2.0. The folksonomy of Web APIs we will describe is modeled to be fully compliant with existing and commonly used public Web API repositories. It is not intended to substitute them, but to complement their contents in order to enable advanced Web API search facilities according to different perspectives.