Semantically Enriched Open API Service Descriptions in the Cloud

We propose an extension of the Open API specification (OAS) for the semantic description of RESTful services. We suggest that API descriptions (eg. on Clouds) be semantically annotated by associating OAS entities to entities in an ontology. The new approach, referred to Semantic OAS (SOAS) eliminates ambiguities and produces descriptions of RESTful services that are understandable by both, humans and machines. Moreover, SOAS descriptions are equivalent (i.e. can be translated) to an ontology. Therefore, SOAS services can be easily discovered (i.e. by other services), queried by Semantic Web query languages (e.g. SPARQL), checked by reasoners (e.g. Pellet) for consistency or inferring new (hidden) relationships and, finally, be used by service orchestration mechanisms.