Context, Quality and Relevance: Dependencies and Impacts on RESTful Web Services Design

While several techniques have been introduced for specifying and acquiring context and quality information associated with Web services, they consider such information representing the whole Web services. However, accessing to context and quality of data resources provided by Web services is crucial. This is particularly relevant for data-intensive Web services of which the context and quality of data resources will strongly impact on the service development and composition. In this paper we contribute an analysis of relationships among context, quality, and relevance, as well as their impact on the design and composition of Web services, in particular at the data resource level. Then, we propose several techniques to incorporate context and quality descriptions into REST APIs and RESTful services publishing. By implementing these features, RESTful Web services could allow the consumer to specify and query context and quality information associated with services and data resources, thus fostering the provision of high relevant data resources. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.