Generating OpenAPI Specifications from Online API Documentation with Large Language Models

AI agents and business automation tools interacting with external web services require standardized, machine-readable information about their APIs in the form of API specifications. However, the information about APIs available online is often presented as unstructured, free-form HTML documentation, requiring external users to spend significant time manually converting it into a structured format. To address this, we introduce OASBuilder, a novel framework that transforms long and diverse API documentation pages into consistent, machine-readable API specifications. This is achieved through a carefully crafted pipeline that integrates large language models and rule-based algorithms which are guided by domain knowledge of the structure of documentation webpages. Our experiments demonstrate that OASBuilder generalizes well across hundreds of APIs, and produces valid OpenAPI specifications that encapsulate most of the information from the original documentation. OASBuilder has been successfully implemented in an enterprise environment, saving thousands of hours of manual effort and making hundreds of complex enterprise APIs accessible as tools for LLMs.