About

Smartlink logo featuring two houses, symbolizing connectivity and home solutions in a modern design

Smart Link was short for “SeMantic Annotation enviRonmenT for Linked Services.” Simply put, it was an easy-to-use Web application that aided users in the creation and browsing of Linked Services – semantic API/service annotations following Linked Data principles. In that, SmartLink allowed any Web API or service provider to describe and expose services based on rich and interlinked Linked Data. Amongst other things, SmartLink provided an interface to populate and navigate through Linked Services repositories, such as iServe. While automation of services discovery and execution was within the scope of the Linked Services approach, iServe provided a set of APIs to further exploit the descriptions provided with SmartLink.

How?

SmartLink built on existing technologies and standards to enable the wide reach of its annotations. Users could annotate arbitrary APIs and services – whether RESTful or WSDL/SOAP-based – via a simple Web editor. Annotations were stored in RDF following established service schemas, namely WSMO-Lite and the Minimal Service Model (MSM), which followed a lightweight approach to Semantic Web Services. In addition, SmartLink extended those schemas with a simple RDF schema for non-functional properties (NfP). Storage of annotations was spread across two public RDF-stores: iServe handled all functional properties while an additional and SmartLink-specific SESAME repository hosted further non-functional descriptions. A unified interface to store and query annotations across both repositories was provided by SmartLink.

Team

Stefan Dietze

Dong Liu

Hong Qing Yu

John Domingue

Acknowledgements

SmartLink’s team would like to thank the following individuals, groups, and organisations for their contribution:

  • SmartLink was partly funded by the EU projects mEducator and NoTube.
  • Carlos Pedrinaci
  • Neil Benn

Publications


Dietze, S., Yu, H.Q., Pedrinaci, C., Liu, D. and Domingue, J. (2011) SmartLink: a Web-based editor and search environment for Linked Services, Demo at 8th Extended Semantic Web Conference, Heraklion, Greece.

Yu, H.Q., Dietze, S., Li, N., Pedrinaci, C., Taibi, D., Dovrolls, N., Stefanut, T., Kaldoudi, E. and Domingue, J. (2011) A Linked Data-driven & Service-oriented Architecture for Sharing Educational Resources, Workshop: 1st International Workshop on eLearning Approaches for Linked Data Age (Linked Learning 2011), Heraklion, Greece, 717, CEUR Workshop Proceedings.

Dietze, S., Benn, N., Yu, H.Q., Pedrinaci, C., Makni, B., Liu, D., Lambert, D. and Domingue, J. (2010) Comprehensive service semantics and light-weight Linked Services: towards an integrated approach, Workshop: Fourth International Workshop SMR2 2010 on Service Matchmaking and Resource Retrieval in the Semantic Web at 9th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), Shanghai, China.

Dietze, S., Benn, N., Yu, H.Q., Pedrinaci, C., Siebes, R., Liu, D. and Domingue, J. (2010) Towards two-stage service representation & reasoning: from lightweight annotations to comprehensive semantics, Poster at EKAW2010 – 17th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management, Lisbon, Portugal.