Towards an ontology of HTTP interactions

TL;DR

This paper proposes an extended RDF vocabulary to formally specify and reason about HTTP interactions, enhancing interoperability and testing in Web-based enterprise systems and IoT applications.

Contribution

It extends an existing RDF vocabulary to improve reusability for formalizing and analyzing HTTP request-response interactions.

Findings

Extended RDF vocabulary for HTTP interactions

Improved reusability of the vocabulary

Facilitates formal reasoning about Web API exchanges

Abstract

Enterprise information systems have adopted Web-based foundations for exchanges between heterogeneous programmes. These programs provide and consume via Web APIs some resources identified by URIs, whose representations are transmitted via HTTP. Furthermore HTTP remains at the heart of all Web developments (Semantic Web, linked data, IoT...). Thus, situations where a program must be able to reason about HTTP interactions (request-response) are multiplying. This requires an explicit formal specification of a shared conceptualization of those interactions. A proposal for an RDF vocabulary exists, developed with a view to carrying out web application conformity tests and record the tests outputs. This vocabulary has already been reused. In this paper we propose to adapt and extend it for making it more reusable.