Web APIs, Processes, and Cloud Computing

Description


Data science, particularly workflows for data analysis, increasingly employs Web Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). The emergence of Big Data has accelerated the growth of the API space, providing us with an excellent opportunity to build an intelligent network of Web APIs and services that empower applications to automatically discover and link information. The fast-growing Web API landscape brings clients more options than ever before, at least in in theory. In practice, they cannot easily switch between different providers offering similar functionality.
Some fundamental problems of semantic interoperability, discovery and autonomous, real-time exploitation are still unsolved. This concerns semantic technologies in two ways: semantics-based applications must be architected to be scalable and composable; semantic technologies can also help to build for composition, resilience and scalability. Cloud-based services do provide for a great deal of storage, management, analysis and exposure of data-driven applications. Applications that make use of semantics must be just as easily and flexibly provisioned using such services if they are to compete with current cloud-backed data-driven applications. The description of services using semantics is a research area with a long pedigree, while, in restricted settings such as scientific and biomedical workflows, the semantic description of processes has been found useful. The time is ripe for explicit formal semantics in the description of the components of data analysis, and their combination into processes, to show their worth. Finally, blockchain-based technologies have recently seen a great deal of interest, beyond their original applications to cryptocurrency, where decentralized trust must be established. This opens up possibilities for synergies with semantic technologies in establishing trust in distributed systems built from heterogeneous services, and presents open questions in defining the behaviours expected in decentralised contracts which have much in common with the aims of semantic service descriptions.
This track is concerned with latest advances in semantic technologies that are suitable to address the challenges and opportunities raised in the context of Web.

 

Topics


Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

  • Solutions for bridging the gap between Web of Data and Web APIs
  • Semantic technologies for
    • interoperability and interchangeability of clients and APIs
    • hypermedia-driven interactions with REST Web APIs
    • decentralized Web applications, both on the client and server side
    • discovery, integration, and composition of services and data APIs
    • capturing the functionality of Web APIs
    • streamlining the creation of applications using distributed, heterogeneous APIs
    • smart deployment and management of API-based applications
    • cloud interoperability and management
    • trusted and secure cloud computing
    • provisioning and managing microservices
    • supporting scientific workflows, business processes, and mash-ups
    • description and discovery of (micro)services, including lightweight virtualization and container technologies
    • exposing and integrating Linked Data through semantic Web APIs
  • Intelligent clients of Web APIs
  • Case studies in the architecture of large-scale semantic and data-driven solutions
  • Applications of blockchain technology
  • Systems, tools, and use cases exploiting semantics within service-oriented applications
  • Address scalability issues while dealing with large data volumes
  • Business models for Linked Data and Web APIs
  • Automated mining and derivation of service semantics and process behaviour
  • Services as the interoperability and integration point for the Internet of Things
  • Privacy-aware service description, representation, processing and reasoning
  • Streaming Web APIs
  • Data pipelines for asynchronous and event-driven APIs
  • Frameworks, methods, models, and formats for describing Web APIs

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