An Ontology-Based Representation of the Twitter REST API

Social Networking Services (SNS) provide users with functionalities for developing their on line social networks, connecting with other users, sharing and consuming content. While most of popular SNS provide open Web 2.0 APIs, they remain disconnected from each other thus fragmenting user's data, social network and content. Semantic social web technologies such as public vocabularies and ontologies can be used for bridging the semantic gap between different SNS. Ontology-based representations of SNS APIs can help developers share knowledge about SNS APIs and can be used for linking APIs with public Social Semantic Web ontologies and vocabularies and for enabling automatic ontology-based service composition. An ontology based representation has been proposed for representing the API of the popular SNS Google+. In this paper, we study the API of Twitter SNS and create an ontology based representation of its structural and functional properties. The proposed Twitter REST API ontology reuses classes of the existing Google+ API ontology and describes valuable structural and functional details of the API, in a machine process able format useful for understanding the API and appropriate for integrating into ontology based Mashups.