Efficient runtime service discovery and consumption with hyperlinked RESTdesc

Hyperlinks and forms let humans navigate with ease through websites they have never seen before. In contrast, automated agents can only perform preprogrammed actions on Web services, reducing their generality and restricting their usefulness to a specialized domain. Many of the employed services cal...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:2011 7th International Conference on Next Generation Web Services Practices pp. 373 - 379
Main Authors: Verborgh, R., Steiner, T., Deursen, D. V., Van de Walle, Rik, Valles, J. G.
Format: Conference Proceeding Publication
Language:English
Published: IEEE 01.10.2011
IEEE Computer Society Publications
Subjects:
68 Computer science
68U Computing methodologies and applications
automated agents
Classificació AMS
Computing Methodologies
Humans
hypermedia links
Informàtica
Informàtica teòrica
Ontologies
Semantic Web
Semantics
Servers
service consumption
service discovery
Web services
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC
ISBN:1457711257, 9781457711251
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Hyperlinks and forms let humans navigate with ease through websites they have never seen before. In contrast, automated agents can only perform preprogrammed actions on Web services, reducing their generality and restricting their usefulness to a specialized domain. Many of the employed services call themselves RESTful, although they neglect the hypermedia constraint as defined by Roy T. Fielding, stating that the application state should be driven by hypertext. This lack of link usage on the Web of services severely limits agents in what they can do, while connectedness forms a primary feature of the human Web. An urgent need for more intelligent agents becomes apparent, and in this paper, we demonstrate how the conjunction of functional service descriptions and hypermedia links leads to advanced, interactive agent behavior. We propose a new mode for our previously introduced semantic service description format RESTdesc, providing the mechanisms for agents to consume Web services based on links, similar to human browsing strategies. We illustrate the potential of these descriptions by a use case that shows the enhanced capabilities they offer to automated agents, and explain how this is vital for the future Web.
ISBN:1457711257
9781457711251
DOI:10.1109/NWeSP.2011.6088208