A Semantic Model to Describe RESTful Services

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 important, although it requires a set of appropriate supporting technologies. The RESTful-based approach has replaced the typical Web service protocol stack introduced by W3C. RESTful style can be used by companies to expose data on the Web but to adopt this paradigm, developers must change how they implement and share services on theWeb because of a uniform interface, as well as the requirement of correctly using HTTP verbs and their semantics; this requires replacing the traditional standard functions and parameters in W3C’s Web services. The problem with the RESTful design is that it uses human-readable formats. Current methods of addressing this issue lack a single 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 context ofworldwide civil aviation is considered specifically for the ICAO’s SWIM program to build an application context for the proposed method. The results obtained indicate the usefulness of the proposed model.