RESTfulGrounding

  1. Introduction

    2. The proposal is to allow the development of semantic Web services according to an architectural style called REST. More specifically, it considers a REST implementation based on the HTTP protocol, resulting in RESTful Semantic Web Services.

    The development of semantic Web services has been the subject of various academic papers. However, the predominant effort considers Web services designed according to another architectural style named RPC, mainly through the SOAP protocol. The RPC approach, strongly stimulated by the software industry, aggregates unnecessary processing and definitions that make Web services more complex than desired. Therefore, services end up being not as scalable and fast as possible. In fact, REST services form the majority of Web services developed within the Web 2.0 context, an environment clearly focused on user-generated content and social aspects.

    The proposal presented here makes use of a specific selection of existing languages and protocols, reinforcing its feasibility. Firstly, OWL-S is used as the base ontology for services, whereas WADL is for syntactically describing them. Secondly, the HTTP protocol is used for transferring messages; defining the action to be executed; and also defining the execution scope. Finally, URI identifiers are responsible for specifying the service interface.

    The final compilation proposed results in an ontology named RESTfulGrounding, which extends OWL-S.

  2. Full Paper

    3. English Version
    Semantic Web Services: A RESTful Approach
    Published in the Proceedings of IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 2009
    Rome, pp. 169-180
    Presentation

    Portuguese Version
    Serviços Semânticos: Uma Abordagem RESTful
    Published in the Proceedings of IADIS Iberian-American Conference WWW/Internet 2009
    Madrid, pp. 35-46
    Presentation

  3. OWL Definition

    4. The formal ontology definition can be found at RESTfulGrounding.owl.

  4. Example

    5. Yahoo’s News Search (YNS) is a RESTful service that allows you to search the Internet for news stories. It queries a wide range of web portals simultaneously, including BBC, CNN, and Yahoo itself. Unfortunately, this web service hasn’t been described formally yet, which prevents semantic software agents from discovering, selecting, and invoking it without human assistance.

    In order to overcome these limitations, both syntactic and semantic descriptions ought to be provided; a task accomplished by the files listed below. Please bear in mind this is a work in progress. Feel free to contribute!

    Syntactic Description
    YNS.wadl (originally created by Marc Hadley)

    Semantic Description
    YNS-Service.owl
    YNS-Profile.owl
    YNS-Process.owl
    YNS-Grounding.owl (RESTfulGrounding ontology applied)