Ontology modeling for REST Open APIs and web service mash-up method

Abstract

According as the web technology rapidly advances, web services are taking a step further up to the era of Web 2.0 which goes beyond the existing closed web services and enables ones to open and share information freely. Web services are usually provided in the form of Open APIs (Application Programming Interface). As the number of open APIs is increasing and its variety of the web services have wide spectrum, mash-up web services that combine several open APIs are fairly proliferated on Web 2.0 environment and even the service users are also interested in producing their own mash-up web services. When generating mash-up web services, however, the users have difficulties in that they should find Open APIs they need by looking up the web service information by their own and also they are forced to determine whether it is necessary. Also, when looking up the web service information, numerous unnecessary Open APIs are retrieved along with the desired Open API, which makes it difficult for users to find desired Open APIs readily and swiftly, because the current Open API search is performed only by key words. To overcome these obstacles, it is necessary to provide a mash-up platform for the service users to be able to generate their own new mash-up web service on their own comfort and purpose they want. In this paper, we present the key technologies for automatic generation of new mash-up service using open APIs. As the key technologies, ontology modeling method specifying the semantic open API information which is necessary for mash-up, is presented. And, the automatic service mash-up method using the ontology will be presented.