Design Approach to Platform Agnostic Service API Modeling for Interoperability of Cross-enterprise Vehicle Applications

In the last few years, the collaboration of services between the service-oriented, cross-enterprise vehicle application frameworks has gradually increased to generate novel and more complicated vehicle services for the automotive industry. In these service collaboration scenarios, where heterogeneous application frameworks participate to realize complex vehicle services, a source of discord that emerges is that the service providers must always check, before the service deployment, whether the clients or service consumers on the other side of the communication link are compatible with a given service's API (Application Program Interface). While using standardized templates like ontologies for API's semantic specifications are crucial for a service discovery and semantic interoperability, nevertheless, accessing these service APIs' semantic data using a standardized and understandable syntactical specification template is also equally substantial to ease services interoperability. In fact, such complex service collaboration scenarios motivate this research work which proposes a design approach towards standardized, domain-specific, platform-agnostic semantic and syntactic specification of vehicle services API models. This paper also uses a typical vehicle domain case study to illustrate the design approach and a reference mapping between the platform-agnostic semantics specifications of a vehicle service API ontological model and its corresponding language-neutral, syntactic representation using the OpenAPI standard.