REST and semantic web

27Nov07

I’ve been searching for initiatives to add semantics to RESTful web services. (Big) Web services are too complex and thus haven’t been widely adopted by average developers, as it’s arguable that it’s worth its complexity. RESTful web services seem a simple and smart alternative, and I wonder if it can be a boost for semantics. A post at The Sun Babelfish Blog describes how RESTful semantic web services could be.

Resource Oriented Architectures (ROA) focus on resources (each resource has a URI). Following REST principles, each resource has a uniform interface, which is determined by the HTTP operations (CRUD = PUT, GET, POST, DELETE). As a result, the importance is held on in the relations among resources. Typically, semantic web services define, among other things, the operations that are made by a service. In a REST architecture, these operations are known and are the same for all resources, so maybe a different approach should be used.

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Tags: rest, semantics