Although mashups fully embrace the idea of customization on the Web, read-write is another story. The complexity of application development using Javascript makes it hard for average developers to create new mashups and to customize the existing ones. To solve this problem, several companies are developing tools for mashup creation that require little or no programming knowledge. These tools, exemplified by Yahoo! pipes, IBM’s QEDwiki and Google’s Mashup Editor, facilitate the selection of some number of RESTful Web services or other Web resources and chain them together by piping one service’s output into the next service’s input while filtering content and making slight format changes.

SA-REST is a microformat to add additional meta-data to (but not limited to) REST API descriptions in HTML and XHTML. Developers can directly embed meta-data from various models such an ontology, taxonomy or a tag cloud into their API descriptions. The embedded meta-data can be used to improve search (for example: perform faceted search for APIs), data mediation (in conjunction with XML annotation) as well as help in easier integration of services to create mashups.

SA-REST submission to W3C can be found here: http://www.w3.org/Submission/SA-REST/

More information about SA-REST can be found here: http://wiki.knoesis.org/index.php/SA-REST