Abstract
REST was originally developed as the architectural foundation for the human-oriented Web, but it has turned out to be a useful architectural style for machine-to-machine distributed systems as well. The most prominent wave of machine-oriented RESTful systems are Web APIs (also known as RESTful services), provided by Web sites such as Facebook, Flickr, and Amazon to facilitate access to the services from programmatic clients, including other Web sites. Currently, Web APIs do not commonly provide machine-processable service descriptions which would help tool support and even some degree of automation on the client side. This chapter presents current research on lightweight service description for Web APIs, building on the HTML documentation that accompanies the APIs. descriptions. HTML documentation can be annotated with a microformat that captures a minimal machine-oriented service model, or with RDFa using the RDF representation of the same service model. Machine-oriented descriptions (now embedded in the HTML documentation of Web APIs) can also capture the semantics of Web APIs and thus support further automation for clients. The chapter includes a discussion of various types and degrees of tool support and automation possible using the lightweight service descriptions.
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Notes
- 1.
In this chapter, we use the terms such as “Web API”, “RESTful service” etc. interchangeably.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
URI templates are defined for instance in WSDL 2.0 HTTP Binding (Web Services Description Language (WSDL) Version 2.0: Adjuncts 2007) in Sect. 6.8.1.1.
- 6.
The term descendant is defined for XML/HTML elements in XPath (XML Path Language XPath 2009).
- 7.
The prefix sawsdl refers to the namespace http://www.w3.org/ns/sawsdl.
- 8.
A notable new technology for transformations between XML and RDF (either way) is XSPARQL (Akhtar et al. 2008), see http://xsparql.deri.org.
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The separation of four types of service semantics is inspired by Sheth (2003).
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The distinction of capabilities and categories is the same that is made by Sycara et al. (2003) between “explicit capability representation” (using taxonomies) and “implicit capability representation” through preconditions and effects.
- 13.
WSMO-Lite does not place any further restrictions on nonfunctional parameters; research in this area, which is out of scope of this book, has not yet converged on a common set of properties that nonfunctional parameters should have.
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Located at http://iserve.kmi.open.ac.uk/.
- 17.
iServe import support for the RDFa form described in “Service Description with the Minimal Service Model and RDFa” (page 488) is planned.
- 18.
- 19.
Atom Syndication Format, see http://rfc.net/rfc4287.html.
- 20.
- 21.
Available at http://sweet.kmi.open.ac.uk/.
- 22.
Watson Semantic Web Search, http://watson.kmi.open.ac.uk.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Dr. Karthik Gomadam for collaboration on the hRESTS microformat. Much of the work presented in this chapter has been supported by the European Union research project SOA4All http://www.soa4all.eu.
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Kopecký, J., Vitvar, T., Pedrinaci, C., Maleshkova, M. (2011). RESTful Services with Lightweight Machine-readable Descriptions and Semantic Annotations. In: Wilde, E., Pautasso, C. (eds) REST: From Research to Practice. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8303-9_22
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