Towards Rules-Based Mapping Framework for RESTful Web Services

Integrating web services is usually time-consuming and requires a lot of programming efforts and experiences due to documentation burden and coding style convention overhead provided by external parties. Fortunately, RESTful web services simplify the integration task compared to the traditional web service WSDL as coding convention is significantly reduced. However, the documentation burden is still evident and developers usually rely on running examples to gain better knowledge and use web service documentation efficiently. The subject of my PhD thesis is to propose a novel rules-based mapping method for mapping a desired web service to potential candidates from a predefined web service repository. In this research, the assumption is that web services are made of RESTful APIs specified in Javascript Object Notation (JSON) format. My significant thesis contributions are: (1) a hybrid model for web service similarity, (2) a rules-based mapping approach for identifying and classifying the most related and similar services against a given desired web service, and lastly (3) a concrete and detailed evaluation to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach and framework.