[[SA-REST]]

Orange United Methodist Church Youth OUMC Youth

     As the number of online applications increase so do sources of structured data repositories in the form of RSS, ATOM and lightweight Web services. These can all be covered by the larger umbrella of REST-based Web services. Many users want to bring together these discrete data to form new data sets that contain parts of the original services. This activity is referred to as building a mashup.

     Until now almost all mashups have been built by hand, which requires a great deal of coding. This solution is of course not scalable since more and more sources are coming online. In this document we propose a way to add semantic metadata to REST-based Web services, called SA-REST services, and a way to create semantic mashups, called Smashups, that rely on the annotated services to remove the hand coding of mashups.

     In this thesis we have shown a novel way to make a RESTful Web service semantic while not altering the service itself and not introducing a new resource that would have to be maintained along with the service. This innovation gives RESTful Web services much of the power that traditional SOAP-based services have, while not taking away any of the flexibility and simplicity for which RESTful Web services were adopted. We have also shown that using these semantic RESTful Web services we can create arbitrary mashups without many of the limitations that plague current mashup editors. In addition, our mashup system is scalable with the number of services.