Adapting SAWSDL for semantic annotations of RESTful services

Abstract

RESTful services are increasingly been adopted as a suitable lightweight solution for creating service-based applications on the Web. However, most often these services lack any machine-processable description and therefore a significant human labour has to be devoted to locating existing services, understanding their documentation, and implementing software that uses them. In order to increase the automation of these tasks, we present an integrated lightweight approach for the creation of semantic RESTful service descriptions. Our work is based on hRESTS, a microformat for including machine-readable descriptions of RESTful service within existing HTML service documentation. We complement hRESTS by the MicroWSMO microformat, which uses SAWSDL-like hooks to add semantic annotations. Finally, we present SWEET - Semantic Web sErvices Editing Tool - which effectively supports users in creating semantic descriptions of RESTful services based on the aforementioned technologies. © Springer-Verlag 2009.