Ontology-based Software Capability Container for RESTful APIs

Software reuse and REST-based Web Applications resulted from open initiatives become an interesting opportunity for companies to save effort, time and cost during the design and development of new business needs. Gather and qualify these services in a container helps to discover, match and reuse them in developing new business applications for companies. Our objective in this work is the design of a software capability container offering a wider view qualification for REST-based services. Moreover, we aim to enrich the designed container with semantic elements to ease the discovery and the selection of the qualified services. In this purpose, we define an ontology based on a proposed Enterprise Architecture Capability Profile offering a qualification covering business, operational and technical aspects for services. Ontologies are widely acknowledged as a means to specify explicitly the meaning of concepts in a domain of interest, and to facilitate consistent sharing of data and knowledge pertaining to them. The qualification profile is based on a proposed meta-model that helps to retrieve and gather initial requirements used to guide the development of existing REST-based Web Applications. Furthermore, a Framework is proposed to exploit the designed container in order to respond to users requirements for developing future business process and efficiently reuse the qualified services. Our contribution aims to upgrade technical components to the level of end-users requirements. This helps to accelerate business application development and improve the reuse and sustainability of existing services.