Survey of Semantic Description of REST APIs
The REST architectural style assumes that client and server form a contract with content negotiation, not only on the data format but implicitly also on the semantics of the communicated data, i.e., an agreement on how the data have to be interpreted [247
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Survey of Semantic Description of REST APIs Ruben Verborgh, Andreas Harth, Maria Maleshkova, Steffen Stadtmüller, Thomas Steiner, Mohsen Taheriyan and Rik Van de Walle
5.1
Introduction
The REST architectural style assumes that client and server form a contract with content negotiation, not only on the data format but implicitly also on the semantics of the communicated data, i.e., an agreement on how the data have to be interpreted [247]. In different application scenarios such an agreement requires vendor-specific content types for the individual services to convey the meaning of the communicated data. The idea behind vendor-specific content types is that service providers can ∗
The bibliography that accompanies this chapter appears at the end of this volume and is also available as a free download as Back Matter on SpringerLink, with online reference linking.
R. Verborgh () Multimedia Lab – Ghent University – iMinds, Gaston Crommenlaan 8 bus 201, Ledeberg-Ghent 9050, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] A. Harth · M. Maleshkova · S. Stadtmüller Institute AIFB, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe 76128, Germany e-mail: [email protected] M. Maleshkova e-mail: [email protected] S. Stadtmüller e-mail: [email protected] T. Steiner Departament de Llenguatges i Sistemes Informatics, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Jordi Girona, 29, Barcelona 08034, Spain e-mail: [email protected] M. Taheriyan Information Science Institute, University of Southern California, Admiralty Way, Suite 1001, Marina del Rey, CA 4676, USA e-mail: [email protected] R. Van de Walle Multimedia Lab – Ghent University – iMinds, Gaston Crommenlaan 8 bus 201, Ledeberg- Ghent 9050, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] C. Pautasso et al. (eds.), REST: Advanced Research Topics and Practical Applications, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-9299-3_5, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
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reuse content types and service consumers can make use of specific processors for the individual content types. In practice however, we see that many RESTful APIs on the Web simply make use of standard non-specific content types, e.g., text/xml or application/json [150]. Since the agreement on the semantics is only implicit, programmers developing client applications have to manually gain a deep understanding of several APIs from multiple providers. Common Web APIs are typically either exclusively described textually1 , or far less frequently—and usually based on third-party contributions—a machine-readable WADL [104] API description exists2 . However, neither human-focused textual, nor machine-focused WADL API descriptions carry any machine-processable semantics, i.e., do not describe what a certain API does. Instead, they limit themselves to a description of machine-readable in- and output parameters in the case of WADL, or a non-machine-readable prose- and/or example-driven description of the API in the case of textual descriptions. While this may suffice the requirements of developers in practice,
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