A framework for the service provisioning of community-contributed web APIs

With the increased adoption of cloud computing in recent years due to its projected benefits as a computing-as-a-utility paradigm, the industry has consequently seen a rise in software-as-a-service via Web services. Serving as a safe and valuable interface between the provider´s data and outsider parties who have a potential use for the data, services allow developers to enhance the value of their applications by integrating with them. Initially, standardization and research efforts were geared largely towards enterprise use-cases of Web services. This resulted in the global Web service vision becoming largely privatized. But in recent years, the number and diversity of Web APIs have increased tremendously and developers have additionally become more open and decentralized. This poses the interesting problem of aggregating the vast number of distributed codebases and exposing them as consumable services for the benefit of all. The existing enterprise-oriented standards are unable to cater to such a scenario. We respond to this by presenting an alternative to the status quo of service registries. We specifically argue for the feasibility of a RESTful framework for the design and implementation of an open service registry that serves a community of Web services that can be contributed to or consumed by any developer on the Web.