Adaptive Service Binding with Lightweight Semantic Web Services

Adaptive service selection is acknowledged to provide a certain number of advantages to optimise the service provisioning process or to cater for advanced service brokering. Semantic Web Services, that is services that have been enriched with semantic annotations have often been used for providing adaptive service selection by deferring the binding of services until runtime. Thus far, however, research on Semantic Web Services has mainly been dominated by rich conceptual frameworks such as WSMO and OWL-S which require a significant effort towards the annotation of services and rely on complex reasoning for which there are no efficient solutions that can scale to the Web yet. In this chapter, inline with current trends on the Semantic Web that sacrifice expressivity in favour of performance, we present a novel approach to providing adaptive service selection that relies on simple conceptual models for services and less expressive formalisms for which there currently exist mature and performant implementations. In particular, we present a set of conceptual models defined in RDF(S) that support both Web services and Web APIs and we show how simple templates abstracting user requirements can be automatically transformed into SPARQL to enable service selection in a scalable manner.