Automated structural semantic annotation for RESTful services

Adding semantics to Web Services can automate the processes of discovery, selection and composition of services. Although many annotating models are proposed to support this automation, the adoption of these models is significantly hampered by the tedious manual annotation process. The unstructured nature of the descriptions of RESTful services is making the goal even harder to achieve than the traditional Web Services. To address this problem, we propose ASSARS, namely Automated Structural Semantic Annotation for RESTful Services, to automatically transform the unstructured RESTful service pages into structured RESTful service descriptions. In our method, there are two key steps: (a) The semantic block division of RESTful service pages, and (b) the identification of the semantics of blocks which significantly describe the RESTful services from different aspects. The evaluation result shows that our approach is practical and effective.