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Functional descriptions as the bridge between hypermedia APIs and the Semantic Web

Published: 17 April 2012 Publication History
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  • Abstract

    The early visions for the Semantic Web, from the famous 2001 Scientific American article by Berners-Lee et al., feature intelligent agents that can autonomously perform tasks like discovering information, scheduling events, finding execution plans for complex operations, and in general, use reasoning techniques to come up with sense-making and traceable decisions. While today-more than ten years later-the building blocks (1) resource-oriented rest infrastructure, (2) Web APIs, and (3) Linked Data are in place, the envisioned intelligent agents have not landed yet. In this paper, we explain why capturing functionality is the connection between those three building blocks, and introduce the functional API description format RESTdesc that creates this bridge between hypermedia APIs and the Semantic Web. Rather than adding yet another component to the Semantic Web stack, RESTdesc offers instead concise descriptions that reuse existing vocabularies to guide hypermedia-driven agents. Its versatile capabilities are illustrated by a real-life agent use case for Web browsers wherein we demonstrate that RESTdesc functional descriptions are capable of fulfilling the promise of autonomous agents on the Web.

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    1. Functional descriptions as the bridge between hypermedia APIs and the Semantic Web

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            cover image ACM Other conferences
            WS-REST '12: Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on RESTful Design
            April 2012
            64 pages
            ISBN:9781450311908
            DOI:10.1145/2307819
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            Publication History

            Published: 17 April 2012

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            Author Tags

            1. api descriptions
            2. hypermedia
            3. rest
            4. semantic web
            5. service descriptions
            6. web apis
            7. web services

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            • (2020)A Model for the Creation of Academic Activities Based on VisitsInnovative Perspectives on Interactive Communication Systems and Technologies10.4018/978-1-7998-3355-0.ch013(261-276)Online publication date: 2020
            • (2020)Tutorial: Distributed Knowledge Graphs for the Web of ThingsCompanion Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on the Internet of Things10.1145/3423423.3423461(1-4)Online publication date: 6-Oct-2020
            • (2020)May Contain Nuts: The Case for API LabelsAdvances in Service-Oriented and Cloud Computing10.1007/978-3-030-63161-1_8(102-113)Online publication date: 5-Dec-2020
            • (2019)Merging Open Data Sources to Plan Learning Activities for Online Students2019 23rd International Conference Information Visualisation (IV)10.1109/IV.2019.00058(306-311)Online publication date: Jul-2019
            • (2019)Exploitation of Open Data Repositories for the Creation of Value-Added ServicesDistributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence, 16th International Conference10.1007/978-3-030-23887-2_16(134-141)Online publication date: 22-Jun-2019
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            • (2018)Linked data techniques for the web of thingsProceedings of the 8th International Conference on the Internet of Things10.1145/3277593.3277641(1-3)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2018
            • (2018)Machine Readable Web APIs with Schema.org Action AnnotationsProcedia Computer Science10.1016/j.procs.2018.09.025137(255-261)Online publication date: 2018
            • (2018)Specifying, Monitoring, and Executing Workflows in Linked Data EnvironmentsThe Semantic Web – ISWC 201810.1007/978-3-030-00671-6_25(424-440)Online publication date: 18-Sep-2018
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