A Framework for Semantic Description of RESTful Web APIs

Support from development tools and infrastructure frameworks is crucial to increase the development of Web APIs that follow the REST architectural principle, leaving the software developer free to focus on the implementation of the business core of the application. This paper introduces a framework for semantic description of RESTful Web APIs, which is based on annotations added to the application code that associate resources, properties and operations with terms semantically described by vocabularies and ontologies. The proposed framework enforces the adoption of design principles for modelingWeb APIs, focusing on resource representations and targeting important features for high concurrency services, such as low coupling and high flexibility among layers.