SA-REST: Semantically Interoperable and Easier-to-Use Services and Mashups

Services based on the representational state transfer (REST) paradigm, a lightweight implementation of a service-oriented architecture, have found even greater success than their heavyweight siblings, which are based on the Web Services Description Language (WSDL.) and SOAP. By using XML-based messaging, RESTful services can bring together discrete data from different services to create meaningful data sets; mashups such as these are extremely popular today.