Enriching Heterogeneous Service Composition with a Semantically Enhanced Service Description Language

The emergence of Web 2.0 and its related technologies such as HTML5 has empowered end-users and made it possible for them to compose their own Web applications. Yet, most of the current development has mainly concentrated on the support of the composition of enterprise-oriented services and scientific workflows and little effort has been made to support the composition of end user-oriented services. In addition, the lack of machinereadable and high-level composite service description languages has prevented the end-users from sharing the service composition knowledge. To overcome these limitations, this paper introduces “HyperMash”, a service composition approach for end-users. HyperMash supports the composition of both RESTful and SOAP-based Web services, and allows both types of service to be freely combined. A description language, called “Semantic-UiSDL”, is used to automatically generate machine-readable and processable descriptions of composite services. Through this language, HyperMash can provide service recommendations to end-users as a way of sharing and reusing their service composition knowledge. This paper presents and illustrates the HyperMash approach and its major concepts and components through real-life examples and empirical study.