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

TL;DR

OBA is a framework that automatically generates RESTful APIs from ontologies, making knowledge graphs accessible to web developers without requiring expertise in Semantic Web technologies.

Contribution

It introduces an approach to create maintainable, standards-compliant REST APIs from ontologies, bridging the gap between ontology engineers and web developers.

Findings

Successfully generated APIs for different ontologies

APIs include documentation, validation, and testing features

Facilitates access to knowledge graphs for non-experts

Abstract

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