From Open API to Semantic Specifications and Code Adapters

Abstract

Today, modern IT-systems are often an interplay of third-party web services. Developers in their role as requesters integrate existing services of different providers into new IT-systems. Providers use frameworks like Open API to create syntactic service specifications from which requesters generate code to integrate services. Proper service discovery is crucial to identify usable services in the growing plethora of third-party services. Most advanced service discovery approaches rely on semantic specifications, e.g., OWL-S. While semantic specifications are crucial for a precise discovery, syntactical specification are needed for service invocation. To close the gap between semantic and syntactic specifications, service grounding establishes links between the semantic and syntactic specifications. However, for a large number of web services still no semantic specification or grounding exists. In this paper, we present an approach that semi-automates the semantic specification of web services for service providers and additionally helps service requesters to leverage semantic web services. Our approach enables a higher degree of automation than other approaches. This includes the creation of semantic specifications and service groundings for service providers as well as the integration of services for requesters by using our code generator. As proof-of-concept, we provide a case study, where we derive a sophisticated semantic OWL-S specification from a syntactic Open API specification.