Machine Readable Web APIs with Schema.org Action Annotations

Abstract

The schema.org initiative led by the four major search engines curates a vocabulary for describing web content. The number of semantic annotations on the web are increasing, mostly due to the industrial incentives provided by those search engines. The annotations are not only consumed by search engines, but also by other automated agents like intelligent personal assistants (IPAs). However, only annotating data is not enough for automated agents to reach their full potential. Web APIs should be also annotated for automating service consumption, so the IPAs can complete tasks like booking a hotel room or buying a ticket for an event on the fly. Although there has been a vast amount of effort in the semantic web services field, the approaches did not gain too much adoption outside of academia, mainly due to lack of concrete incentives and steep learning curves. In this paper, we suggest a lightweight, bottom-up approach based on schema.org actions to annotate Web APIs. We analyse schema.org vocabulary in the scope of lightweight semantic web services literature and propose extensions where necessary. We show that schema.org actions could be a suitable vocabulary for Web API description. We demonstrate our work by annotating existing Web APIs of accommodation service providers. Additionally, we briefly demonstrate how these APIs can be used dynamically, for example, by a dialogue system. actions † Throughout the paper, the term "Web API" refers to all HTTP APIs that adopt a certain resource hierarchy and run over HTTP. For the sake of clarity, we ignore the fact that not all "RESTful APIs" are following all REST architectural design principles. Throughout the paper "RESTful Web Service/API and "Web API" terms may be used interchangeably

Enrichment of Schema.org with cultural heritage context standards for the description and processing of electronic thesis and dissertations

“…The first group is the studies that have evaluated the functionality of Schema.org vocabulary and their retrieval and visibility in different fields. Examples are studies by Mixter et al (2014), Meusel et al (2015), Friedrich (2015), Wallis et al (2017), Simsek et al (2017), Cole et al (2017), Balcı et al (2018), Freire et al (2018), Simsek et al (2018), Vidojevic (2019), Simsek et al (2020), Freire (2021), Jana and Rout (2022), Payne and Verhey (2022), Belz (2022), Wang et al (2022) and Iliadis et al (2023). These studies have concentrated on the use of the Schema.org vocabularies in describing Web resources and entities description like theses and dissertations, entity-based search, Europeana network, content enrichment with semantic data, linking to the Linked Data, Linked Open Data, Semantic annotation in the tourism domain, metadata aggregation in a cultural heritage context, resources of the human library, data managers, markup in E-commerce projects, Linked data-based machine-to-machine sales contract conclusion and models the world of search.…”

Building an Ecosystem for the Tyrolean Tourism Knowledge Graph

“…Finally, we needed to annotate the active data to allow bookings and purchases of touristic products and services by automated agents or third party software applications. Therefore we developed a way to annotated web APIs with the schema.org vocabulary and hence represent them as lightweight semantic web services [12]. The resulting "action wrapper" was applied to the internet booking engine software providers Easybooking, Feratel and Kognitiv.…”

“…The touristic data stored in the knowledge graph is reachable via a SPARQL interface 12 and open to everyone. For the purpose of demonstration and experimentation we applied four different use case scenarios on the graph's data.…”

Intent Generation for Goal-Oriented Dialogue Systems based on Schema.org Annotations

“…In order to decouple a dialogue system from the Web APIs, the services should be annotated too. The functional and behavioural description of Web APIs can potentially guide generation of dialogue flows as also explained in our recent work [17]. Benefiting from semantic web service descriptions for a dialogue has been explored in the literature by the SmartWeb [18] project.…”

“…We analyzed schema.org actions in the scope of lightweight semantic web services. The details of this analysis is outside of the scope of this paper and we refer the reader to our work in [17]. In this section we show what such an API annotating may look like and what kind of implications does it have for generating intents for goal-oriented dialogue systems.…”