Publish data as time consistent web API with provenance

Miel Vander Sande, Pieter Colpaert, Tom De Nies, Erik Mannens, Rik Van de Walle

Abstract: Many organisations publish their data through a Web API. This stimulates use by Web applications, enabling reuse and enrichments. Recently, resource-oriented APIs are increasing in popularity because of their scalability. However, for organisations subject to data archiving, creating such an APIraises certain issues. Often, datasets are stored in different files and different formats. Therefore, tracking revisions is a challenging task and the API has to be custom built. Moreover, standard APIs only provide access to the current state of a resource. This creates time-based inconsistencies when they are combined. In this paper, we introduce an end-to-end solution for publishing a dataset as a time-based versioned REST API, with minimal input of the publisher. Furthermore, it publishes the provenance of each created resource. We propose a technology stack composed of prior work, which versions datasets, generates provenance, creates an API and adds Memento Datetime negotiation.