IServe: a linked services publishing platform

Abstract

Despite the potential of service-orientation and the efforts devoted so far, we are still to witness a significant uptake of service technologies outside of enterprise environments. A core reason for this limited uptake is the lack of appropriate publishing platforms able to deal with the existing heterogeneity in the service technologies landscape and able to provide expressive yet simple and efficient discovery mechanisms. In this paper we describe iServe, a novel and open platform for publishing services which aims to better support their discovery and use. It exposes service descriptions as linked data expressed in terms of a simple vocabulary for describing services of different kinds with annotations in diverse formalisms. In addition to describing iServe, this paper also highlights the set of principles behind iServe, which we believe are essential for other generic repositories of semantic information notably ontology repositories.