API terms of agreement enforcement system

Abstract

Since the introduction of the World Wide Web, organisations have set up web sites and provided users with information. What these websites lacked was complexity - they were static, non-interactive and proprietary. As the World Wide Web evolved to what we call nowadays Web 2.0, it has introduced a new technology which provides organisations the opportunity to publically provide functionalities available on their website, to third parties. This concept is known as Web APL Web APIs open a gateway through which the organisation's data and functionalities, previously considered as 'private', can be retrieved and used on third party websites. As a result an API is the key which enables Internet businesses to go beyond their own website and increase their visibility on every other website. The corporate data, product and brand can travel anywhere, gaining visibility in new places, therefore reaching a larger client base. The Web has advanced towards an application development platform which provides a set of libraries accessible through public APis. Thus, web developers are building web applications, known as mashups, which combine data or functionalities from several APis to create new innovative services which would have previously required a large amount of effort. Such comprehensive facilities clearly increase the development of mashups at a very fast rate. However, how will organisations providing an API control were their data is being distributed? API Owners compile a set of Terms of Agreement dictating requirements such as the placement of the corporate logo or that advertisements, adjacent to the API data provided, do not promote pornography or drugs. In an ideal world, once these Terms of Agreement are accepted by Web developers, they would be abided to. However, this is not the case. The API Owner will have to enforce them and therefore conduct continuous check-ups on web sites publishing the data provided by his APL At present, this is in fact done manually by visually checking that API data is embedded in a website which adheres to the API's Tenns of Agreement. With the increasing number of web developers using APis, such a process is not viable. It is time consuming and financially impossible to maintain. In this final year project we propose a web-based system which enforces a set of Terms of Agreement, chosen by an API Owner, in real-time.