Semantic web service automation with lightweight annotations

Web services, both RESTful and WSDL-based, are an increasingly important part of the Web. With the application of semantic technologies, we can achieve automation of the use of those services. In this paper, we present WSMO-Lite and MicroWSMO, two related lightweight approaches to semantic Web service description, evolved from the WSMO framework. WSMO-Lite uses SAWSDL to annotate WSDL-based services, whereas MicroWSMO uses the hRESTS microformat to annotate RESTful APIs and services. Both frameworks share an ontology for service semantics together with most of automation algorithms

WSMO-lite annotations for web services

and other research output

WSMO-Lite: lowering the semantic web services barrier with modular and light-weight annotations

Services are an increasingly important part of the Web, and they are a necessary component of the semantic Web. Semantic Web services (SWS) are a research effort towards automation of the use of Web services, enhancing existing SOA capabilities with intelligent and automated integration. We have introduced WSMO-Lite, a lightweight service ontology intended for semantic annotations of the Web Service Description Language WSDL. In contrast to preceding SWS frameworks such as OWL-S and WSMO, WSMO-Lite simplifies the semantic descriptions and enables bottom-up semantic annotation of Web services, but very importantly, it also relaxes the requirements on completeness of semantic descriptions, which enables building incremental layers of semantics on top of existing service descriptions. In this work, we describe various useful subsets of the extent of semantic annotation on Web services with respect to the requirements of SWS automation tasks; and we detail the means of validating SWS descriptions with flexible levels of strictness

Semantic web service offer discovery for e-commerce

Semantic Web Services (SWS) are an important part of the Semantic Web, traditionally focused on discovery and composition of e-services. In the area of e-commerce services, it is necessary to go past the granularity of service discovery and also to consider discovering the actual offers provided by a service. Nevertheless, Semantic Web Services research has only recently started to consider offer discovery. In this paper, we present a solution for offer discovery that uses WSMO-Lite, the new lightweight semantic Web service annotation framework

hRESTS: An HTML microformat for describing RESTful web services

The Web 2.0 wave brings, among other aspects, the programmable Web: increasing numbers of Web sites provide machine-oriented APIs and Web services. However, most APIs are only described with text in HTML documents. The lack of machine-readable API descriptions affects the feasibility of tool support for developers who use these services. We propose a microformat called hRESTS (HTML for RESTful Services) for machine-readable descriptions of Web APIs, backed by a simple service model. The hRESTS microformat describes main aspects of services, such as operations, inputs and outputs. We also present two extensions of hRESTS: SA-REST, which captures the facets of public APIs important for mashup developers, and MicroWSMO, which provides support for semantic automation

Towards Automated Invocation of Web APIs

This paper, targeting the large variety of Web APIs, presents an approach towards automated invocation of Web APIs. This approach applies a data schema, to the SAWSDL lowering schema mapping, a grounding mechanism that connects the ontological representations of Web APIs with their execution messages. It is intuitive to existing standard efforts and effective in coping with the heterogeneities witnessed by a majority of Web APIs

A Framework for Automating the Invocation of Web APIs

Web APIs, characterized by their relative simplicity and their natural suitability for the Web, have become increasingly dominant in the world of services on the Web. Despite their popularity, Web APIs are so heterogeneous in terms of the underlying principles adopted and the means used for publishing them that discovering, understanding and notably invoking Web APIs is nowadays more an art than a science. In this paper, we present our work towards supporting the automated invocation of Web APIs. In particular, we describe a framework that provides a unique entry point for the invocation of most Web APIs that can be found on the Web, by exploiting non-intrusive semantic annotations of HTML pages describing Web APIs in order to capture both their semantics as well as information necessary to carry out their invocation

iServe: a linked services publishing platform

Despite the potential of service-orientation and the efforts devoted so far, we are still to witness a significant uptake of service technologies outside of enterprise environments. A core reason for this limited uptake is the lack of appropriate publishing platforms able to deal with the existing heterogeneity in the service technologies landscape and able to provide expressive yet simple and ecient discovery mechanisms. In this paper we describe iServe, a novel and open platform for publishing services which aims to better support their discovery and use. It exposes service descriptions as linked data expressed in terms of a simple vocabulary for describing services of different kinds with annotations in diverse formalisms. In addition to describing iServe, this paper also highlights the set of principles behind iServe, which we believe are essential for other generic repositories of semantic information notably ontology repositories

Web Service Scope Annotations

Web services are usually described with Web Service Description Language, which generally assumes that services are always available, and it does not provide a built-in mechanism for describing that services may have a scope. In our paper, we describe the concept of web service scope and we propose a simple mechanism for annotating WSDL with scope information, so that clients can automatically evaluate whether a particular service is useful for them. We demonstrate how XPath can be used to express scoping conditions, however, our solution is extensible with respect to the scope expression language so semantic languages can also be incorporated for applications that require the full expressivity of logics