Model-Based Search and Ranking of Web APIs Across Multiple Repositories

Web API search and reuse for agile Web application development may benefit from selection criteria that combine several perspectives: they can be performed based on features used to describe APIs, or according to the co-occurrence of Web APIs in the same applications, or they can be driven through ratings assigned by designers who used the Web APIs for their own mashups. Nevertheless, different Web API repositories usually focus on a subset of these perspectives, thus providing complementary Web API descriptions. In this paper, we propose a unified model for Web API characterization. The model enables a cross-repository search of Web APIs and mashups, based on different kinds of similarity between them, identified regardless the complementarity of their descriptions. This unified representation improves retrieval results if compared with a Web API search performed over multiple repositories considered separately.