Web API recommendation based on service cooperative network

Representational state transfer (REST) is the current design standard for Web Application Programmable Interfaces (Web APIs or APIs). Unfortunately, existing Web API search engines allow for only keyword or tag-based searches for RESTful services without considering advanced functionality, such as contextual recommendation or visualization. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, referred to as ServRel, to recommend relevant Web APIs based on the proposed service cooperative network for a target Web API. ServRel recommends users three kinds of RESTful services: competitive, pre-cooperative, and post-cooperative services for the selected services. Meanwhile, ServRel also displays the service cooperative network via the visualization technique to allow convenient browsing and accessing. The developed prototype fully demonstrates the feasibility and efficacy of the SerRel approach.