• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.115-126
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• 2012

Mashups have become very popular over the last few years, and their use also varies for IT convergency services. In spite of their popularity, there are several challenging issues when combining Open APIs into mashups, First, since portal sites may have a large number of APIs available for mashups, manually searching and finding compatible APIs can be a tedious and time-consuming task. Second, none of the existing portal sites provides a way to leverage semantic techniques that have been developed to assist users in locating and integrating APIs like those seen in traditional SOAP-based web services. Third, although suitable APIs have been discovered, the integration of these APIs is required for in-depth programming knowledge. To solve these issues, we first show that existing techniques and algorithms used for finding and matching SOAP-based web services can be reused, with only minor changes. Next, we show how the characteristics of APIs can be syntactically defined and semantically described, and how to use the syntactic and semantic descriptions to aid the easy discovery and composition of Open APIs. Finally, we propose a goal-directed interactive approach for the dynamic composition of APIs, where the final mashup is gradually generated by a forward chaining of APIs. At each step, a new API is added to the composition.