EXPRESS: EXPressing REstful Semantic Services Using Domain Ontologies

Existing approaches to Semantic Web Services (SWS) require a domain ontology and a semantic description of the service. In the case of lightweight SWS approaches, such as SAWSDL, service description is achieved by semantically annotating existing web service interfaces. Other approaches such as OWL-S and WSMO describe services in a separate ontology. So, existing approaches separate service description from domain description, therefore increasing design efforts. We propose EXPRESS a lightweight approach to SWS that requires the domain ontology definition only. Its simplicity stems from the similarities between REST and the Semantic Web such as resource realization, self describing representations, and uniform interfaces. The semantics of a service is elicited from a resource’s semantic description in the domain ontology and the semantics of the uniform interface, hence eliminating the need for ontologically describing services. We provide an example that illustrates EXPRESS and then discuss how it compares to SAREST and WSMO.