Transformation of REST Service Description for Structured Service Registry

On the early stage of its life cycle, a web service must first be discovered before it is accessed by its clients. A web service description is a document published by the service provider that allows potential clients to get hold of information of a web service during the discovery process. Web services built based on simple object access protocol (SOAP) use a standardized XML document known as Web Service Description Language (WSDL) to describe itself. On the other hand, most web services built based on representational state transfer (REST) has yet to be described in a structured form. REST service description is mainly written in text in HTML documents aimed to be read by human readers, thus containing little to none machine-readability properties. This work proposes a solution that accounts standardization and machine-readability property while still considers the simplicity and human readability property of REST service description written in HTML documents. The solution combines concepts that have been proposed before to construct a new service description mechanism to allow human-readability and machine-readability while still maintaining its simplicity and standardization.