GitHub-Sourced Web API Evolution: A Large-Scale OpenAPI Dataset

This study presents a dataset curated using a software tool called the crawler, which gathers OpenAPI Specifications (OAS) from GitHub. The crawler efficiently collects versioned OAS files and metadata, reflecting API development evolution. It incorporates functionalities for updating, validating, parsing OAS files, ensuring dataset accuracy and relevance. With over three years of data, including 660,000 artifacts from 2.8 million commits, the dataset offers insights into OpenAPI standards adoption and its impact on API development. This paper discusses the dataset and crawler’s application in research and API development, highlighting their role in understanding API practices.