Link-based viewing of multiple Web API repositories

Web API sharing, fueled by large repositories available online, is becoming of paramount relevance for agile Web application development. Approaches on Web API sharing usually rely on single Web API repositories, which provide complementary Web API descriptions, on which different search facilities can be implemented. In this paper, we propose a framework for defining a linked view over multiple repositories and for searching their content. In particular, we apply Linked Data principles to publish repository contents and identify semantic links across them in order to exploit complementary Web API descriptions. We discuss how Web API sharing across multiple repositories, based on such a link-based view, may benefit from selection criteria that combine several aspects in Web API characterization. A preliminary evaluation based on two popular public Web API repositories is presented as well