WSMO-Lite and hRESTS: lightweight semantic annotations for Web services and RESTful APIs

Service-oriented computing has brought special attention to service description, especially in connection with semantic technologies. The expected proliferation of publicly accessible services can benefit greatly from tool support and automation, both of which are the focus of Semantic Web Service (SWS) frameworks that especially address service discovery, composition and execution. As the first SWS standard, in 2007 the World Wide Web Consortium produced a lightweight bottom-up specification called SAWSDL for adding semantic annotations to WSDL service descriptions. Building on SAWSDL, this article presents WSMO-Lite, a lightweight ontology of Web service semantics that distinguishes four semantic aspects of services: function, behavior, information model, and nonfunctional properties, which together form a basis for semantic automation. With the WSMO-Lite ontology, SAWSDL descriptions enable semantic automation beyond simple input/output matchmaking that is supported by SAWSDL itself. Further, to broaden the reach of WSMO-Lite and SAWSDL tools to the increasingly common RESTful services, the article adds hRESTS and MicroWSMO, two HTML microformats that mirror WSDL and SAWSDL in the documentation of RESTful services, enabling combining RESTful services with WSDL-based ones in a single semantic framework. To demonstrate the feasibility and versatility of this approach, the article presents common algorithms for Web service discovery and composition adapted to WSMO-Lite

From RESTful Services to RDF: Connecting the Web and the Semantic Web

RESTful services on the Web expose information through retrievable resource representations that represent self-describing descriptions of resources, and through the way how these resources are interlinked through the hyperlinks that can be found in those representations. This basic design of RESTful services means that for extracting the most useful information from a service, it is necessary to understand a service's representations, which means both the semantics in terms of describing a resource, and also its semantics in terms of describing its linkage with other resources. Based on the Resource Linking Language (ReLL), this paper describes a framework for how RESTful services can be described, and how these descriptions can then be used to harvest information from these services. Building on this framework, a layered model of RESTful service semantics allows to represent a service's information in RDF/OWL. Because REST is based on the linkage between resources, the same model can be used for aggregating and interlinking multiple services for extracting RDF data from sets of RESTful services

Semantic annotation of Web APIs with SWEET

Recently technology developments in the area of services on the Web are marked by the proliferation of Web applications and APIs. The development and evolution of applications based on Web APIs is, however, hampered by the lack of automation that can be achieved with current technologies. In this paper we present SWEET - Semantic Web sErvices Editing Tool - a lightweight Web application for creating semantic descriptions of Web APIs. SWEET directly supports the creation of mashups by enabling the semantic annotation of Web APIs, thus contributing to the automation of the discovery, composition and invocation service tasks. Furthermore, it enables the development of composite SWS based applications on top of Linked Data

WSMO-lite annotations for web services

and other research output