Accessing Web APIs as "Virtual" Relational Databases or Knowledge Graphs

Francesco Corcoglioniti, research assistant at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano will guide you through this session. Query languages for databases (e.g., SQL) and knowledge graphs (e.g., SPARQL) provide developers, analysts, and researchers with a concise, declarative, and highly flexible mechanism to access (or even modify) the data of interest in a large dataset. Yet, in many use cases, a part or all the data is accessible only through Web APIs. Thus, data access is comparatively less convenient and flexible (due to restrictions on available API methods), and perhaps slower, becoming incompatible with users interactively querying data. In this session, we present open source components that address these issues by enabling the querying of a web API as a "virtual" (since not materialised) relational database via SQL or as a "virtual" knowledge graph via SPARQL. Simultaneously providing pre-computation and caching solutions of Web APIs results to speed up data access. The core components presented were developed in the framework of the research project HIVE, a project co-financed through "Fusion Grant", involving as partners also the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano and the company Ontopic Srl. The latter aims at extending virtual knowledge graphs to Web APIs, with a particular focus on NLP APIs (for accessing unstructured data) and on applications in the domain of environmental sustainability.

This time we will meet again at the space NOISE. Not sure where it is? Have a look here https://bit.ly/3zUDYFy, get in touch or ask at the Info Desk on the ground floor of the main building.

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