SA-REST and (S)mashups : Adding Semantics to RESTful Services

The evolution of the Web 2.0 phenomenon has led to the increased adoption of the RESTful services paradigm. RESTful services often take the form of RSS/Atom feeds and AJAX based light weight services. The XML based messaging paradigm of RESTful services has made it possible to compose various services together. Such compositions of RESTful services is widely referred to as Mashups. In this paper, we outline the limitations in current approaches to creating mashups. We address these limitations by proposing a framework called as SA-REST. SA-REST adds semantics to RESTful services. Our proposed framework builds upon the original ideas in WSDL-S, our W3C submission, which was subsequently adapted for Semantic Annotation of WSDL (SAWSDL), now a W3C proposed recommendation. We demonstrate use of microformats for semantic annotation of RESTful services and then the use of such semanti- cally enabled services with better support for interoperability for creating dynamic mashups called SMashups.