An Empirical Evaluation of the Quality of Interoperability Specifications for the Web

The Web no longer defines itself through pre-build web pages simply delivered by a web server. Today, web-based services exchange data with Rich Internet Applications, which run completely inside the web browser or on mobile devices. The service front ends in the future will be gradually enriched by sophisticated mashups or apps. The service back ends are designed to be highly reusable and feature a generic services pattern that requires well defined interfaces to provide a semantically interoperable data exchange. An automatic and objective quality evaluation of the service definitions is strongly emphasised to assert the usability and practicability of the interface specifications. This empirical study verifies the applicability of the automatic quality evaluation using the Semantic Interoperability Engineering (SIE) approach developed by the Fraunhofer ISST: Well established standards for the Internet are inspected using selected quality indicators. This paper revisits and evaluates the concrete results of the proposed quality evaluation, elaborates on the extent and scope of the available means, and discusses the applicability of the used quality evaluation system.