World Wide Web Consortium Research Articles

A SKOS vocabulary for Linked Land Administration: Cadastre and Land Administration Thesaurus

Intensification of international communication calls for multilingual terminology databases and other linguistic tools. The World Wide Web Consortium framed the further specification of the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS), which is a formal language designed for standardized representation of structured vocabularies, as well as the Linked Data methodology of publishing structured data in a machine-readable and interlinked way, that they become more useful. Applying the Linked Data approach, the European Commission recently established e-Government Core Vocabularies. This paper describes the development of a Knowledge Organization System (KOS) in terms of a thesaurus for the domain of cadastre and land administration. The main purpose is to contribute towards the development of ‘Linked Land Administration’ that adopts Linked Data technologies for semantic management of datasets kept in public registries, and scholarly and legislative resources kept in libraries. The proposed controlled vocabulary in SKOS format may be used for specifying metadata records of scholarly and legislative resources, as well as enrichment of these resources through semantic annotations. It also provides a base for further ontology development initiatives. The thesaurus is mainly derived from terms of the standard ISO 19152:2012 Land Administration Domain Model, which represents the static aspect of the domain. Reports of the project Property Formation in the Nordic countries (Kort og Matrikelstyrelsen, 2006) provide the basis for the temporal or activity aspect of the domain, while the ANSI/NISO, 2005 Guidelines for the Construction, Format, and Management of Monolingual Controlled Vocabularies provided methodological advice. The thesaurus consists of 143 terms, the relations of which are recorded according to the mentioned SKOS standard. About one fourth of the terms are adopted from existing thesauri, including the AGROVOC multilingual agricultural vocabulary, the GEMET Thesaurus with INSPIRE Spatial Data Themes, and the STW Thesaurus for Economics.

Insight: Semantic Provenance and Analysis Platform for Multi-center Neurology Healthcare Research.

Insight is a Semantic Web technology-based platform to support large-scale secondary analysis of healthcare data for neurology clinical research. Insight features the novel use of: (1) provenance metadata, which describes the history or origin of patient data, in clinical research analysis, and (2) support for patient cohort queries across multiple institutions conducting research in epilepsy, which is the one of the most common neurological disorders affecting 50 million persons worldwide. Insight is being developed as a healthcare informatics infrastructure to support a national network of eight epilepsy research centers across the U.S. funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This paper describes the use of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) PROV recommendation for provenance metadata that allows researchers to create patient cohorts based on the provenance of the research studies. In addition, the paper describes the use of descriptive logic-based OWL2 epilepsy ontology for cohort queries with "expansion of query expression" using ontology reasoning. Finally, the evaluation results for the data integration and query performance are described using data from three research studies with 180 epilepsy patients. The experiment results demonstrate that Insight is a scalable approach to use Semantic provenance metadata for context-based data analysis in healthcare informatics.

Experiences with creating a Precision Dairy Farming Ontology (DFO) and a Knowledge Graph for the Data Integration Platform in agriOpenLink

One of the central problems in creating information management solutions for precision dairy farming is integration and interpretation of heterogeneous data coming from different equipment and data sources. Establishing a unifying data model is recognized as a cornerstone to such solutions. Here, the challenge lies both in agreeing on a common information context, and in selecting appropriate model representations, model query and update techniques, which guarantee model extensibility. While already existing ISOagriNET Data Dictionaries capture broad variety of the livestock and dairy farming concepts, the existing model representation technics cannot support efficient model extension. In this paper, we present our experience with using the representation and query standards and tools of the Semantic Web, endorsed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), in particular the Resource Description Framework (RDF), the Web Ontology Language (OWL), and the SPARQL query standard, to encode and manipulate the dairy farming domain knowledge in a form of the Dairy Farming Ontology (DFO). Within the research project agriOpenLink the DFO has been created in two phases. The first phase focused on using the Semantic Web tools to facilitate easy encoding and manipulation of the dairy farming domain knowledge and the platform operational data models. The second phase focused on translating ISOagriNET Data Dictionaries into their semantic representations. Resulting DFO is maintained in a semantic repository, and it presents a knowledge graph and as integration backbone for the agriOpenLink decision support platform.

Evolution of the Web and its Uses in Healthcare

1. Hassan A. Aziz, PhD, MLS(ASCP)cm[⇑][1] 1. College of Arts and Sciences, Qatar University, Doha – Qatar 2. Aisha Madani 1. Weill Cornell Medical College – Qatar, Doha – Qatar 1. Address for Correspondence: Hassan A. Aziz, PhD, MLS(ASCP)cm , Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Director and Associate Professor of Biomedical Science, College of Arts and Sciences, Qatar University, P.O. Box: 2713, Doha – Qatar, 00974-4403-4783, Hassan.Aziz{at}qu.edu.qa 1. Define the term “world wide web”. 2. Identify and describe the roles of the pioneers responsible for the development of the world wide web. 3. Describe the evolution of the generations of the web. 4. Compare and contrast the four generations of the web. 5. Discuss the current and potential applications of the web in healthcare. INTRODUCTION Before the Internet, people obtained health information from consulting a healthcare provider, books, magazines and newspapers or simply by asking family and friends. Nowadays, the internet has become a major source of information for those who have access to it. Large numbers of patients rely on the internet as a source for their queries regarding medical information including diagnosis, control, treatment and prognosis of either their own health or relatives and loved ones. The world wide web is not identical to the internet but it is the most prominent part of it. The “web” is defined as a techno-social system that allows individuals to interact on technological networks, thus improving individual's cognition, communication and cooperation.1 The revolutionary idea of the web was introduced by Tim Burners Lee. The web and its related technologies have progressed tremendously in the past two decades. Four generations have risen since the launch of the web. The web of cognition was known as “Web 1.0”, which was considered as the first generation and a read-only format of the web. Although revolutionary, it provided limited user interaction especially for commercial businesses to share information with customers. It was basically used to search for information and read it. Second came “Web 2.0” with the ability to read and write. It allowed managing significant crowds with common interests in social interactions as defined by Dale Dougherty in 2004. The semantic web, “Web 3.0”, provided machine-readable content on the web. It is made up of two main platforms,… ABBREVIATIONS: UDI - Universal Document Identifier, HTML - Hypertext Markup Language, HTTP - Hypertext Transfer Protocol, URI - Universal Resource Identifier, GWT - Google Web Toolkit, RSS - Really Simple Syndication, W3C - World Wide Web consortium, EHR - Electronic Health Record, HIS - Hospital Information System, LIS - Laboratory Information System, PACS - Picture Archive and Communication System 1. Define the term “world wide web”. 2. Identify and describe the roles of the pioneers responsible for the development of the world wide web. 3. Describe the evolution of the generations of the web. 4. Compare and contrast the four generations of the web. 5. Discuss the current and potential applications of the web in healthcare. [1]: #corresp-1

Big-data: transformation from heterogeneous data to semantically-enriched simplified data

In big data, data originates from many distributed and different sources in the shape of audio, video, text and sound on the bases of real time; which makes it massive and complex for traditional systems to handle. For this, data representation is required in the form of semantically-enriched for better utilization but keeping it simplified is essential. Such a representation is possible by using Resource Description Framework (RDF) introduced by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Bringing and transforming data from different sources in different formats into the RDF form having rapid ratio of increase is still an issue. This requires improvements to cover transition of information among all applications with induction of simplicity to reduce complexities of prominently storing data. With the improvements induced in the shape of big data representation for transformation of data to form into Extensible Markup Language (XML) and then into RDF triple as linked in real time. It is highly needed to make transformation more data friendly. We have worked on this study on developing a process which translates data in a way without any type of information loss. This requires to manage data and metadata in such a way so they may not improve complexity and keep the strong linkage among them. Metadata is being kept generalized to keep it more useful than being dedicated to specific types of data source. Which includes a model explaining its functionality and corresponding algorithms focusing how it gets implemented. A case study is used to show transformation of relational database textual data into RDF, and at end results are being discussed.

SPARQL queries on RDF with fuzzy constraints and preferences

With the widespread acceptance of RDF (Resource Description Framework) as the de-facto standard recommended by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) for the representation and exchange of information on the Web, a huge amount of RDF data is being proliferated and becoming available. Efficient querying of RDF data is therefore of increasing importance. Preference queries and fuzzy queries are required for personalized queries, and have been extensively investigated in the context of databases. Focusing on SPARQL (Simple Protocol and RDF Query Language), we propose a fuzzy extension of SPARQL with preferences in this paper. First, we extend SPARQL with fuzzy sets by allowing the occurrence of fuzzy terms, fuzzy operators and fuzzy relations. Second, we introduce multi-dimensional preferences into the fuzzy SPARQL. Based on fuzzy set theory, we also propose a set of translation rules to convert the fuzzy SPARQL with preferences into crisp SPARQL. Finally we propose an effective scoring function to calculate the order of query results, which integrates the preferences and membership degrees. The proposed approach is evaluated with experiments as well.

Library Web sites for people with disability: accessibility evaluation of library websites in Pakistan

Purpose – This study aims to assess the accessibility of library Web sites of top ten universities of Pakistan. The study also explores commonly identifies accessibility barriers in the subject Web sites. Accessibility analysis of library Web sites has been conducted using Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool (WAET) to examine compliance of the library Web site with Web Content Accessibility Guideline 2.0. The study also attempts to rank each Web site according to number of quality issues identified. Based on literature review, the study also proposes a framework to conduct Web accessibility evaluation of library Web sites. Web accessibility encompasses all disabilities that affect access to the Web, including visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive and aging (old-age). Design/methodology/approach – This study examines accessibility of subject Web sites using automated accessibility evaluation tool based on Library Web site Accessibility Evaluation Framework (LWAEF). Commercial WAET SortSite® was used to assess accessibility issues in library Web sites. The tool was also tested to validate components of the LWAEF. Findings – Result shows that 70 per cent of library Web sites do comply with World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards. It means that compliance to essential guidelines of priority A level of WCAG 2.0 are finely met by 70 per cent library Web sites of Pakistan. However, important accessibility issues still exist in the subject Web sites. Moreover, in terms of accessibility issues, overall quality of university library Web sites in Pakistan is in better condition. Originality/value – Equal access to information by all citizens is an important UN charter supported by all developing countries. Assessing the needs of all citizens has been of great importance and value to developing countries like Pakistan, with 19.2 per cent population consisting of disabled people. The paper presents the overall status of accessibility to information and is conducted to focus the library Web sites of Pakistan for the first time. Focusing the library Web sites for accessibility evaluation, this research study will help improve accessibility elements of library Web sites in other developing countries also.

SEARCH AND ORCHESTRATION OF DATA AND PROCESSES IN A FEDERATED ENVIRONMENT

Abstract. This paper describes on-going research on streamlining the access and use of spatial data and processes in Australia. Spatial data in Australia is available on-line at many levels of government from local authorities, state and territories (jurisdictions), and nationally from the Commonwealth and other sources. Much of this data is available via Open Geospatial Consortium and World Wide Web Consortium standard web services. This abstract discusses three related research topics that have been identified by a wide range of stakeholders through a comprehensive consultation process. These are search and discovery, federation and orchestration of data and processes. The commonality across the three research topics is that they all require Semantic Web and Artificial Intelligence methods and embrace the various standards, and if needed, propose modifications to such standards.

The Protégé Project: A Look Back and a Look Forward.

Few funded research projects in computer science go on for decades. It’s even questionable whether any project should be sustained that long. Nevertheless, the Protege project at Stanford University began in the 1980s and is still going strong, helping developers to construct reusable ontologies and to build knowledge-based systems. The recognition of our work at the International Semantic Web Conference in October 2014 with the “Ten Years” Award was a great honor. The award has provided an opportunity f o r reflection—both on the Protege project itself and on the need for computational infrastructure in the AI community. Protege has become the most widely used software for building and maintaining ontologies. It is by no means the only solution, and there are known problems with Protege, but we appreciate that the system is extremely popular. Although his study is now a bit dated, Cardoso (2007) surveyed the Semantic Web community and found that two-thirds of his respondents used Protege. To date, more than 250,000 people have registered to use the software. Many Fortune 500 companies use Protege to build their ontologies. Important government projects, such as the development of the National Cancer Institute Thesaurus (Noy et al., 2008; Figure 1) and the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11; Tudorache et al., 2010) depend on the software. Figure 1 The Protege 5 Desktop System. The figure shows the most recent version of the Protege system used to edit the National Cancer Institute Thesaurus. In the Figure, the user has selected the class Antigen Gene. The visualization ... Protege currently exists in a variety of frameworks. A desktop system (Protege 5) supports many advanced features to enable the construction and management of OWL ontologies (see Figure 1). A Web-based system (WebProtege) offers distributed access over the Internet using any Web browser and, by design, is much simpler to use for many ontology-engineering tasks (Figure 2). The Web-based version has become extremely popular, and it recently exceeded the desktop-client in its degree of usage. It is extremely handy to be able to point a Web browser to an appropriate server and to begin editing. Like a Google doc, a WebProtege ontology can be easily shared with a distributed group of users who can engage in collaborative authoring activities from wherever they happen to be logged in. The development environment used by the World Health Organization to manage ICD-11 is based on WebProtege (Tudorache et al., 2010). Figure 2 WebProtege. The Web-based version of Protege offers users and their collaborators the opportunity to share and edit ontologies online, much like a Google doc. Here we see the Ontology for Parasite Lifecycle (OPL), an ontology ... Older versions of the Protege desktop system have included support for editing ontologies represented in a frame language (namely, in the OKBC framework developed by the DARPA Knowledge Sharing Initiative in the 1990s; Neches et al., 1991). Comparable functionality has not yet been migrated to current versions of Protege, however. All versions of Protege may be downloaded from the project’s Web site (http://protege.stanford.edu). They are available under an open-source license. The paper for which the Protege team won the “Ten Years” Award (Knublauch et al., 2004) describes the first Protege system to support the World Wide Web Consortium’s recommended Web Ontology Language (OWL). We had been tracking the emerging OWL specification, and Holger Knublauch, then a post-doctoral fellow in our laboratory, worked with the rest of the team to extend Protege to create what was, at the time, the only ontology-development platform that could accommodate nearly the complete OWL specification. Protege’s support for OWL has been enhanced over the years, particularly through a very successful collaboration with Alan Rector’s CO-ODE project at the University of Manchester, and recent versions of Protege fully support the latest OWL 2.0 specification. When people think of Protege, they think of an editor for ontologies, and they think of OWL. Protege did not start out this way, however. Gennari et al. (2003) traced the history of the first 15 years of the Protege project, documenting the many shifts in perspective as Protege progressed from a student project for a Ph.D. dissertation that focused on problems of building knowledge-based systems (Musen, 1989) to a major open-source platform supported by a huge community of diverse users (Musen, 2005).

Clustering and Bayesian Approach-based Model for Detection of Phishing

Phishing is an internet attack that aims to get users sensitive information by fraud websites. Website phishing is one of the major attacks by which most of internet users are being fooled by the phisher. The best way to protect from phishing is to recognize a phish. Phishing emails usually appear to come from well-known organization and ask your personal information such as credit card number, security number, account number or passwords. What actually attacker does? The attacker creates the no of replicas of authenticate sites, and users are forced to direct to that websites by attracting them with offers. As standard mentioned in W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), I am proposing a system which can easily recognize the difference between authenticate site and phishing site. There are certain standards which are given by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), based on these standards I am choosing some features which can easily describe the difference between legit site and phish site. To protect you from phishing, I am proposing a model to determine the fraud sites. To determine the phishing attack, URL features and HTML features of web page are considered. Clustering algorithm such as K-Means clustering is applied on the database and prediction techniques such as Naive Bayes Classifier is applied. By applying this, probability of the web site as valid Phish or Invalid Phish. To check the validity of URL,if still we are not able decide the validity of web page then Naive Bayes Classifier is applied . also training model is applied for the extraction of HTML tag features of site and probability. Index Terms Anti Phishing Technique, Bayesian Approach, Data Mining, Database Clustering, and Phishing Attack.

An Empirical Evaluation of Security Indicators in Mobile Web Browsers

Mobile browsers are increasingly being relied upon to perform security sensitive operations. Like their desktop counterparts, these applications can enable SSL/TLS to provide strong security guarantees for communications over the web. However, the drastic reduction in screen size and the accompanying reorganization of screen real-estate significantly changes the use and consistency of the security indicators and certificate information that alert users of site identity and the presence of strong cryptographic algorithms. In this paper, we perform the first measurement of the state of critical security indicators in mobile browsers. We evaluate ten mobile and two tablet browsers, representing over 90% of the market share, against the recommended guidelines for web user interface to convey security set forth by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). While desktop browsers follow the majority of guidelines, our analysis shows that mobile browsers fall significantly short. We also observe notable inconsistencies across mobile browsers when such mechanisms actually are implemented. We show where and how these failures on mobile browsers eliminate clues previously designed for, and still present in, desktop browsers to detect attacks such as phishing and man-in-the-middle. Finally, we offer advice on where current standards are unclear or incomplete.

The rationale of PROV

The prov family of documents are the final output of the World Wide Web Consortium Provenance Working Group, chartered to specify a representation of provenance to facilitate its exchange over the Web. This article reflects upon the key requirements, guiding principles, and design decisions that influenced the prov family of documents. A broad range of requirements were found, relating to the key concepts necessary for describing provenance, such as resources, activities, agents and events, and to balancing prov’s ease of use with the facility to check its validity. By this retrospective requirement analysis, the article aims to provide some insights into how prov turned out as it did and why. Benefits of this insight include better inter-operability, a roadmap for alternate investigations and improvements, and solid foundations for future standardization activities.

Identification of Prosodic Features of Punjabi for Enhancing the Pronunciation Lexicon Specification (Pls) for Voice Browsing

Voice browsing requires speech interface framework. Pronunciation Lexicon Specification (PLS) 1.0 is a recommendation of Voice Browser Working Group of W3C (World-Wide Web Consortium), a machinereadable specification of pronunciation information which can be used for speech technology development. This global PLS standard is applicable across European and Asian languages and this specification is extendable to all human languages. However, it currently does not cover morphological, syntactic and semantic information associated with pronunciations. In Indian languages, grammatical information is relatively encoded in its morphology, than syntax unlike English where the grammatical information is an integral part of syntax. In this paper, PLS 1.0 has been examined from the perspective of augmentation of prosodic features of Punjabi such as tone, germination etc.

Accesibilidad web en el espacio universitario público argentino

The study presents a first web accessibility diagnosis carried out in 2012 on a sample of pages from the Argentine public university space. The evaluation establishes the compliance with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, taking into account the methodological recommendations from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The results suggest that the web accessibility barriers encountered are serious for the most part (level A). The most frequent are related to markup language syntax, content presentation, non-text content and visual readability of text. Likewise it is shown that by addressing these barriers, certain groups of people could benefit specifically.

Development of ontology from Indian agricultural e-governance data using IndoWordNet: a semantic web approach

Purpose – The purpose of this explorative research study is to focus on the implementation of semantic Web technology on agriculture domain of e-governance data. The study contributes to an understanding of problems and difficulties in implantations of unstructured and unformatted unique datasets of multilingual local language-based electronic dictionary (IndoWordnet). Design/methodology/approach – An approach to an implementation in the perspective of conceptual logical concept to realization of agriculture-based terms and terminology extracted from linked multilingual IndoWordNet while maintaining the support and specification of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard of semantic Web technology to generate ontology and uniform unicode structured datasets. Findings – The findings reveal the fact about partial support of extraction of terms, relations and concepts while linking to IndoWordNet, resulting in the form of SynSets, lexical relations of Words and relations between themselves. This helped in generation of ontology, hierarchical modeling and creation of structured metadata datasets. Research limitations/implications – IndoWordNet has limitations, as it is not fully revised version due to diversified cultural base in India, and the new version is yet to be released in due time span. As mentioned in Section 5, implications of these ideas and experiments will have good impact in doing more exploration and better applications using such wordnet. Practical implications – Language developer tools and frameworks have been used to get tagged annotated raw data processed and get intermediate results, which provides as a source for the generation of ontology and dynamic metadata. Social implications – The results are expected to be applied for other e-governance applications. Better use of applications in social and government departments. Originality/value – The authors have worked out experimental facts and raw information source datasets, revealing satisfactory results such as SynSets, sensecount, semantic and lexical relations, class concepts hierarchy and other related output, which helped in developing ontology of domain interest and, hence, creation of a dynamic metadata which can be globally used to facilitate various applications support.

Adding Geospatial Data Provenance into SDI—A Service-Oriented Approach

Geospatial data provenance records the derivation history of a geospatial data product. It is important in evaluating the quality of data products. In a Geospatial Web Service environment where data are often disseminated and processed widely and frequently in an unpredictable way, it is even more important in identifying original data sources, tracing workflows, updating or reproducing scientific results, and evaluating reliability and quality of geospatial data products. Geospatial data provenance has become a fundamental issue in establishing the spatial data infrastructure (SDI). This paper investigates how to support provenance awareness in SDI. It addresses key issues including provenance modeling, capturing, and sharing in a SDI enabled by interoperable geospatial services. A reference architecture for provenance tracking is proposed, which can accommodate geospatial feature provenance at different levels of granularity. Open standards from ISO, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and OGC are leveraged to facilitate the interoperability. At the feature type level, this paper proposes extensions of W3C PROV-XML for ISO 19115 lineage and “Parent Level” provenance registration in the geospatial catalog service. At the feature instance level, light-weight lineage information entities for feature provenance are proposed and managed by Web Feature Services. Experiments demonstrate the applicability of the approach for creating provenance awareness in an interoperable geospatial service-oriented environment.

Aircraft Design Markup Language for Multidisciplinary Aircraft Design and Analysis

The process of conceptual aircraft design has advanced tremendously in the past few decades due to rapidly developing computer technology. Today’s modern aerospace systems exhibit strong interdisciplinary coupling and require a multidisciplinary, collaborative approach. Efficient transfer, sharing, and manipulation of aircraft design and analysis data in such a collaborative environment demand a formal, structured representation of data. Extensible markup language, which is a World Wide Web Consortium recommendation, is one such standard concomitant with a number of powerful capabilities that alleviate interoperability issues in a collaborative environment. A compact, generic, and comprehensive extensible markup language schema for an aircraft design markup language is proposed here to represent aircraft conceptual design and analysis data. The purpose of this unified data format is to provide a common language for data communication and to improve efficiency and productivity within a multidisciplinary, collaborative aircraft design environment. An important feature of the proposed schema is the very expressive and efficient low-level schemata (raw data, mathematical objects, and basic geometry). As a proof of concept, the schema is used to encode an entire Convair B58. The reduction in effort (gain in value) to exchange data models and analysis results in the aircraft design markup language increases with the complexity of models and the number of disciplines.

The Rationale of PROV

The prov family of documents are the final output of the World Wide Web Consortium Provenance Working Group, chartered to specify a representation of provenance to facilitate its exchange over the Web. This article reflects upon the key requirements, guiding principles, and design decisions that influenced the prov family of documents. A broad range of requirements were found, relating to the key concepts necessary for describing provenance, such as resources, activities, agents and events, and to balancing PROV’s ease of use with the facility to check its validity. By this retrospective requirement analysis, the article aims to provide some insights into how PROV turned out as it did and why. Benefits of this insight include better inter-operability, a roadmap for alternate investigations and improvements, and solid foundations for future standardization activities

Privacy Issues in SOAP Message Exchange Pattern for Social Services

A Web service is defined as an autonomous unit of application logic that provides either some business functionality or information to other applications through an Internet connection. Web services are based on a set of eXtensible Markup Language XML standards such as Universal Description, Discovery and Integration UDDI, Web Services Description Language WSDL, and Simple Object Access Protocol SOAP. Nowadays Web services are becoming more and more popular for supporting different social applications, thus there are also increasing demands and discussions about Web services privacy protection in information. In general, privacy policies describe an organization's data practices on what information they collect from individuals e.g., consumers and what e.g., purposes they do with it. To enable privacy protection for Web service consumers across multiple domains and services, the World Wide Web Consortium W3C published a document called “Web Services Architecture WSA Requirements” that defines some specific privacy requirements for Web services as a future research topic. This paper presents a mathematical model to construct the privacy policies in SOAP Message Exchange Patterns MEP for social services. Further, this paper also presents the privacy policies in security tokens with SOAP messages.

WSMO-Lite and HRESTS: Lightweight Semantic Annotations for Web Services and Restful APIs

Service-oriented computing has brought special attention to service description, especially in connection with semantic technologies. The expected proliferation of publicly accessible services can benefit greatly from tool support and automation, both of which are the focus of Semantic Web Service (SWS) frameworks that especially address service discovery, composition and execution. As the first SWS standard, in 2007 the World Wide Web Consortium produced a lightweight bottom-up specification called SAWSDL for adding semantic annotations to WSDL service descriptions. Building on SAWSDL, this article presents WSMO-Lite, a lightweight ontology of Web service semantics that distinguishes four semantic aspects of services: function, behavior, information model, and nonfunctional properties, which together form a basis for semantic automation. With the WSMO-Lite ontology, SAWSDL descriptions enable semantic automation beyond simple input/output matchmaking that is supported by SAWSDL itself. Further, to broaden the reach of WSMO-Lite and SAWSDL tools to the increasingly common RESTful services, the article adds hRESTS and MicroWSMO, two HTML microformats that mirror WSDL and SAWSDL in the documentation of RESTful services, enabling combining RESTful services with WSDL-based ones in a single semantic framework. To demonstrate the feasibility and versatility of this approach, the article presents common algorithms for Web service discovery and composition adapted to WSMO-Lite.