Microservices - Lightweight Service Descriptions for REST Architectural Style

Current web has a vast number of applications available that offer users a wide domain of services. Most services, however, cannot be machine processed, which limits service composition for application and mashup development. Research on Semantic Web Services contributes to the improvement of interoperability and composition of applications and services. Many approaches cover service description by following paradigms such as Web Services and REST architectural style, allowing describing any kind of service for its use by an automatic agent, but sometimes using these solutions can be a time-consuming task. This paper introduces Microservices, a lightweight service classification framework for REST architectural style. Microservices do not attempt to describe every possible service, but to provide a way to describe a set of services in a simple way. Microservice descriptions consist of a set of terms that represent service features. After describing features semantically, microservices framework allows generating detailed service descriptions, which allows reusing common feature descriptions across different services. A use case that adapts heterogeneous search services to produce a standard interface using microservices is described.