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

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.