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Home modified on 22 September 2014 at 15:37 | 948,620 views

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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 provide a Web application called iServe Browser which is based on the Linked Data API and it is implemented through Elda. On the other hand, iServe provides access to all the information it hosts as well as support for uploading services through a RESTful API defined according the Swagger specification.

Further information about the browser and the API can be found at: