OBA: An Ontology-Based Framework for Creating REST APIs for Knowledge Graphs

In recent years, Semantic Web technologies have been increasingly adopted by\nresearchers, industry and public institutions to describe and link data on the\nWeb, create web annotations and consume large knowledge graphs like Wikidata\nand DBPedia. However, there is still a knowledge gap between ontology\nengineers, who design, populate and create knowledge graphs; and web\ndevelopers, who need to understand, access and query these knowledge graphs but\nare not familiar with ontologies, RDF or SPARQL. In this paper we describe the\nOntology-Based APIs framework (OBA), our approach to automatically create REST\nAPIs from ontologies while following RESTful API best practices. Given an\nontology (or ontology network) OBA uses standard technologies familiar to web\ndevelopers (OpenAPI Specification, JSON) and combines them with W3C standards\n(OWL, JSON-LD frames and SPARQL) to create maintainable APIs with\ndocumentation, units tests, automated validation of resources and clients (in\nPython, Javascript, etc.) for non Semantic Web experts to access the contents\nof a target knowledge graph. We showcase OBA with three examples that\nillustrate the capabilities of the framework for different ontologies.\n