Adapting REST To REAST, Building Smarter Interactions for Personal Web Tasking

REpresentational State Transfer (REST) today represents and transfers the data-states of distributed resources. Through hypermedia-based interactions among these representations and transfers, the web's original goal of information retrieval is accomplished. However, despite of the fact that the web today has evolved beyond information retrieval into task executions, the original web interaction model built for information browsing has not been enhanced accordingly. This paper proposes a hypermedia-based RESTful model for task expression, delegation and execution through the representations and transfers of action-states of distributed resources, termed as REpresentational Action State Transfer (REAST). The contributions of this paper are (1) a representation of hypermedia-based task expressions that enables the building of user-controlled interactive apps; (2) a technique for Resource Oriented Web Automation (ROWA) using a dedicated media type designed for machine processing as well as machine-initiated and machine-executed task expressions within the RESTful HATEOAS constraints; (3) REST-based Resource Oriented Intelligent Agents (ROIA) to act on users' behalf across the web without domain-specificity; and (4) an interoperability model for tasks execution involving diversified resources types (e.g., enterprise resources and internet of things) working seamlessly together within the RESTful architecture.