Home
From iServe Support Wiki
Contents |
1 What
iServe is the place on the Web where linked data meets services. In a nutshell, iServe is a platform for publishing Semantic Web Services as linked data, no matter their original format.
2 Why
Service-orientation advocates the development of complex distributed applications based on the reuse and composition of existing functionality offered as services. Essential to this vision are the publishing and discovery of services. A number of repositories have been created to this end but they have failed to provide suitable support for publishing and querying them in expressive and extensible manner.
3 iServe Vocabulary
In order to reduce the amount of manual effort required for finding, combining and using services, it is necessary to provide a common vocabulary based on existing Web standards and practices able to describe services in a way that allows machines to automatically locate and filter services according to their functionality or the data they handle independently from the underlying formalism originally used for describing them.
iServe uses at its core a simple vocabulary built upon what we refer to as the Minimal Service Model which provides skeletal definition for services of different kinds, together with WSMO-Lite for additional expressivity and hRESTS for including support for Web APIs and RESTful services.
Essential to iServe are a set of transformation plugins that generate RDF in terms of the vocabularies above out of service annotations expressed in a variety of formalisms. Currently the system supports, SAWSDL, WSMO-Lite, MicroWSMO and partly OWL-S. By means of these transformations iServe provides an homogeneous description for services that were orginally annotated using heterogeneous means.
4 How to Use iServe
The current version of iServe provides 2 main access points to its functionality. On the one hand we have developed a GWT Application called iServe Browser. On the other hand iServe provides access to all the information it hosts as well as support for uploading services through a RESTful API. The API offers the data both in human readable HTML as well as RDF based on linked data principles.
Further information about the browser and the API can be found at: