A Semantic Model to Describe RESTful Services

Abstract

With the spread of Web service technology, developers in heterogeneous communities have aimed to address the sharing and use of services on the Web in a growing and disorganized service description infrastructure. Service-oriented computing has proven to be essential, although it requires a set of appropriate supporting technologies. The RESTful service approach has replaced the typical Web service protocol stack introduced by W3C. RESTful style can be used by companies to expose data on the Internet, but to adopt this paradigm, developers must change how they implement and share services on the Web. RETSTful style adopts a uniform interface and the correct use of HTTP verbs and their semantics; these choices require replacing the traditional stack of constructors and parameters used by W3C’s Web services. The problem with RESTful design is that it uses human-readable formats to publish descriptions. Current methods of addressing this issue lack an agreed machine-readable semantic model to define service descriptions that support complex automatic operations via the services. This paper presents a semantic model for describing RESTful services based on the OWL-S ontology, which can store service descriptions in a repository that represents all RESTful objects with a semantic machine-readable language, OWL-DL. The authors considered the context of worldwide civil aviation, through the ICAO SWIM program, to build an application context for the proposed method. The results obtained indicate the usefulness of the proposed model.

Keywords

• RESTful
• ontologies
• OWL for services
• machine-readable
• semantics