Linking Data from RESTful Services

One of the main goals of the Semantic Web is to extend current human-readable Web resources with semantic information encoded in a machine-processable form. One of its most successful approaches is the Web of Data which by following the principles of Linked Data have made available several data sources compliant with the Semantic Web technologies, such as, RDF triple stores, and SPARQL endpoints. On the other hand, the set of the architectural principles that underlie the human-readable Web has been conceptualized as the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style. In this paper, we distill REST concepts in order to provide a mechanism for describing REST (i.e. human-readable Web) resources and transform them into semantic resources. The strategy allowed us to harvest already existing Web resources without requiring changes on the original sources, or ad-hoc interfaces. We illustrate our approach with an application and expect that the presented approach may contribute to the availability of more data sources and become a further step to lower the entry barrier to semantic resources publishing.