A Web Service Composition Method Based on OpenAPI Semantic Annotations

Automatic Web service composition is a research direction aimed to improve the process of aggregating multiple Web services to create some new, specific functionality. The use of semantics is required as the proper semantic model with annotation standards is enabling the automation of reasoning required to solve non-trivial cases. Most previous models are limited in describing service parameters as concepts of a simple hierarchy. Our proposal is increasing the expressiveness at the parameter level, using inherited concept properties that define attributes The paper also describes how parameters are matched to create, in an automatic manner, valid compositions. The composition algorithm is practically used on descriptions of Web services implemented by REST APIs expressed by OpenAPI specifications. Our proposal uses knowledge models to enhance these OpenAPI constructs with JSON-LD annotations in order to obtain better compositions for involved services.