seMeja API Design Based on CRUD+N Concept

Abstract

seMeja is an ongoing research to develop a desktop system for university environment. To support the development of this system, an Application Programming Interface (API) is needed to provide access to online university services such as course notes, course schedules and course registration interface. This paper proposes a research to create and design the API for seMeja named seMejaAPI. The primary goal for this API is to allow programmers to quickly develop applications that can interact with university online system that support the API. The API needs to be versatile enough to encapsulate the variations of online university services and yet easy enough to be used by an application programmer. The design of the API is based on the four operations of Create, Read, Update and Delete (CRUD). In addition to these four basic concepts, the concept of 'Notify' has been added to support the registration for push-style notifications. These principles are then combined with an existing university-based ontology. This ontology defines the various objects used in a university environment. Two prototypes were then developed and tested to demonstrate an implementation of a portion of the API, along with a small working application.