Deriving Intensional Descriptions for Web Services

International audienceMany data providers make their data available through Web service APIs. In order to unleash the potential of these sources for intelligent applications, the data has to be combined across different APIs. However, due to the heterogene-ity of schemas, the integration of different APIs remains a mainly manual task to date. In this paper, we model an API method as a view with binding patterns over a global RDF schema. We present an algorithm that can automatically infer the view definition of a method in the global schema. We also show how to compute transformation functions that can transform API call results into this schema. The key idea of our approach is to exploit the intersection of API call results with a knowledge base and with other call results. Our experiments on more than 50 real Web services show that we can automatically infer the schema with a precision of 81%-100%