A community-based, Graph API framework to integrate and orchestrate cloud-based services

The ever-accelerating growth of cloud-based services (CBS) and the prevalence of multi-sided business models have distributed users´ data across different data silos that hinder mobile applications development and sustainability. The present paper aims at describing an open framework that abstracts functionality from CBSs through a common Graph, RESTful API, which manages calls among various CBS APIs and syndicates responses under a common standardized format. Combining this conceptual framework with semantically enriched modeling, the implemented platform allows a community of developers to govern, extend and maintain the Graph API and consequently, applications to access a plethora of CBSs through a single point of access. Building on the experience of third-party solutions that mash-up data from different services in their API, the proposed approach goes beyond the state-of-the art through its community-orientation, the API extensibility-by-design and the advanced context awareness and sophistication it provides to developers.