Bridging the semantic Web and Web 2.0 with Representational State Transfer (REST)

Semantic Web technologies must integrate with Web 2.0 services for both to leverage each others strengths. We argue that the REST-based design methodologies [R.T. Fielding, R.N. Taylor, Principled design of the modern web architecture, ACM Trans. Internet Technol. (TOIT) 2 (2) (2002) 115–150] of the web present the ideal mechanism through which to align the publication of semantic data with the existing web architecture. We present the design and implementation of two solutions that combine REST-based design and RDF [D. Beckett (Ed.), RDF/XML Syntax Specification (Revised), W3C Recommendation, February 10, 2004] data access: one solution for integrating existing web services and one server-side solution for creating RDF REST services. Both of these solutions enable SPARQL [E. Prud’hommeaux, A. Seaborne (Eds.), SPARQL Query Language for RDF, W3C Working Draft, March 26, 2007] to be a unifying data access layer for aligning the Semantic Web and Web 2.0.