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

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

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

Towards Constraint-Based Composition With Incomplete Service Descriptions

We apply our work on Web service discovery with initially incomplete information to the problem of service com- position. Rich semantic descriptions of Goals and Web ser- vices allow the unambiguous specification of constraints on what services are required and offered respectively. However, the data provided in service descriptions may be incomplete. We describe how missing instance data may be fetched dynamically and used for richer service discovery. We show how the resultant knowledge base can be used for simple compositions of services having mutual constraints.peer-reviewe

Innovative Solution to Service Discovery and Integration using WSMOLX

WSMX is a Semantic Web services broker enabling dynamic discovery and agile B2B integration of enterprise services. Our framework enables on-demand service discovery encompassing frequently changing aspects like fine-grained client's search requests and intricacies of service functionality. WSMX has a strong notion of mediation that overcomes heterogeneities on the data and protocol level, allowing services to be seamlessly executed. The main premise of using WSMX from a business perspective is its problem-oriented approach; tasks are specified at design time in terms of \what", not \how", and the business partners providing the optimal solutions are automatically discovered, selected and used at execution time.peer-reviewe