Role-Centric RESTful Services Description and Composition for E-Business Applications

Currently there are increasing interests in using REST architecture style to implement business process. However, the importance of role is not emphasized. In fact role is critical to determine the RESTful services description and to control the services composition. This paper presents a role-centric RESTful services description and composition mechanism to implement business process. Firstly a resource meta-model is proposed, and then process and role are formally defined, RESTful services description is then generated based on role and BPEL is extended by introducing the concept of role to control the access to resources. A case study is also given to illustrate the approach and the desirable features of the approach are discussed.