Efficient runtime service discovery and consumption with hyperlinked RESTdesc

Abstract

Abstract-Hyperlinks and forms let humans navigate with ease through websites they have never seen before. In contrast, automated agents can only perform preprogrammed actions on Web services, reducing their generality and restricting their usefulness to a specialized domain. Many of the employed services call themselves RESTful, although they neglect the hypermedia constraint as defined by Roy T. Fielding, stating that the application state should be driven by hypertext. This lack of link usage on the Web of services severely limits agents in what they can do, while connectedness forms a primary feature of the human Web. An urgent need for more intelligent agents becomes apparent, and in this paper, we demonstrate how the conjunction of functional service descriptions and hypermedia links leads to advanced, interactive agent behavior. We propose a new mode for our previously introduced semantic service description format RESTdesc, providing the mechanisms for agents to consume Web services based on links, similar to human browsing strategies. We illustrate the potential of these descriptions by a use case that shows the enhanced capabilities they offer to automated agents, and explain how this is vital for the future Web.

Distributed Semantic Discovery for Web-of-Things Enabled Smart Buildings

“…We here rely on the concept of RESTdec proposing a semantic facilitating service consumption between devices [15]. Each service owns a description of which protocols it supports (e.g.…”

“…A first approach consists of using a special code in the request indicating one wants to access the description of the mentioned resource. We can illustrate this principle when using HTTP by setting the method to OPTION, as proposed by [15]. Unfortunately the CoAP protocol does not provide the OPTION method.…”

Choreographing Web Services with Semantically Enhanced Scripting

“…For example, WS-CDL [12] lacks an appropriate URI-based vocabulary for semantic annotations and other Semantic Web Service solutions such as WSMO [13] are expressive and powerful but also relatively heavyweight, and consequently difficult to apply to portable devices (e.g., mobile phones and tablet PC, etc.). Several lightweight vocabularies have been developed for semantic annotation and targeting at either SOAPbased WSs or RESTful WSs or both, including WSMOLite [14], hRESTS [15] (HTML for RESTful Services) and RESTdesc [16]. Also, WS annotation tools have been developed and are still evolving.…”

Web-based service brokerage for robotic devices

“…Regarding service selection and the strategic planning of how to make use of services to achieve a certain goal, semantic description technologies are emerging in the WoT domain that aim to describe the interactions of services and to allow automatic reasoning about service usage: Technologies like ReLL [1] or RESTdesc [8] aim to provide such semantic markup within API descriptions and could allow robots to plan their actions given a well-defined goal. For instance, in [8], a semantic interface description language is defined whose capabilities are illustrated with a machine-readable description of which REST interfaces should be used by a computer program to retrieve the size of an image, which includes the step of uploading the file to a server and requesting its size.…”

“…For instance, in [8], a semantic interface description language is defined whose capabilities are illustrated with a machine-readable description of which REST interfaces should be used by a computer program to retrieve the size of an image, which includes the step of uploading the file to a server and requesting its size. For this, the language uses Notation3 1 which extends the RDF data model to add assertion and logic capabilities combined with user-defined vocabularies.…”