A framework for the description, discovery and composition of RESTful semantic web services

Development of a semantic web is gaining a lot of traction recently. At the same time, another change is also getting a lot popular on the web - a move from complex SOAP based web services to the simpler RESTful services that work over the existing HTTP infrastructure. Various techniques had been proposed to add semantics to RESTful services. But most of these solutions suffer from the fact that they are either extensions of solutions applicable for SOAP based services or they require external description files which leaves developers with one more artifact to develop and maintain. One of the the objectives of this paper is to define a standard Microformats like syntax that helps to annotate semantics into the already existing documentation of these services doubling them as a machine-readable description. Further, the paper extends these basic annotations to link between related services and enable automatic discovery and composition. Syntax for discovering resources as users browse a website is also proposed and a proof-of-concept extension is developed for the Google Chrome browser.