Efficient Runtime Service Discovery and Consumption with Hyperlinked RESTdesc
Venue
The 7th International Conference on Next Generation Web Services Practices (NWeSP 2011), Salamanca, Spain
Publication Year
2011
Authors
Ruben Verborgh, Thomas Steiner, Davy Van Deursen, Rik Van de Walle, Joaquim Gabarro
BibTeX
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.
