Extracting Business Execution Processes of API Services for Mashup Creation

Mashup services creation has become a new research issue for service-oriented complex application systems. During the mashup service creation, how to extract business execution processes among APIs plays an important role when a mashup service developer receives a bunch of recommended API services. However, it does not exist an effective way to perform mashup recommendation with the support of extracting API business execution processes. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for automated extraction of API business execution processes for mashup creation. Based on the proposed word-domain matrix model, API annotation in a mashup service is transformed as a bipartite graph problem that is solved by the maximum bipartite matching algorithm to semantically annotate involved APIs. Then, directed dependency network among APIs is constructed by analyzing path dependencies and evaluating the compound polarity. Finally, API business execution processes in a mashup service can be extracted. The advantage of the work is that it generates business execution processes instead of a list of independent APIs, which can significantly facilitate mashup service creation for software developers. To validate the performance, we conduct extensive experiments on a large-scale real-world dataset crawled from ProgrammableWeb. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our proposed approach.