Re: A broader discussion: the usefulness of REST

Hi Rigel,

This topic is also being discussed in other W3C groups, including the Web
Agents Community group that i co-chair.  If you are interested in this
area, please feel free to attend one of our regular sessions. I am sure we
would be interested in getting a perspective from the Hydra CG and any
initiative from your side would be of interest to us...

Rem

Associate Professor Rem Collier
Co-PI CAMEO (Creating an Architecture for Manipulating Earth Observation
data)
Co-Chair W3C Agents on the Web Community Group

UCD School of Computer Science, College of Science,
University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland.

Tel: +353-1-7162465  |  Fax: +353-1-2697262  |  Email: rem.collier@ucd.ie
Website: https://people.ucd.ie/rem.collier

On Tue 10 Jun 2025, 12:41 Rigel, <zedr@zedr.com> wrote:

> Hello Pierre.
>
> I've read your article with interest. One small bit caught my attention:
>
> > except if we use an AI as a REST client…
>
> I've been thinking about this in the last few weeks. REST as an
> alternative to the MCP[1], which is JSON-RPC.
>
> A properly implemented, fully auto-describing REST application would work
> well with autonomous agents using LLM and reasoning mechanisms. A really
> cool demo would be one where an LLM-based client is able to navigate such
> an application to complete a task with no prior knowledge on how the API
> works.
>
> One big hurdle, in my opinion, of REST is that the client needs to
> understand the language of the server in order to use it. Prior to LLMs,
> this was only possible if that language was coded into the client. LLMs are
> very good at inferring this through a conversation, which in this case are
> the RESTful state transitions driven by hyperlinked and expressive
> resources.
>
> I think there might be an opportunity to put forth a new and better
> standard for agent communication and cooperation. LLM agents are the killer
> application for a Semantic Web powered by RESTful applications.
>
> Shall we work on it?
>
> Cheers.
> Rigel.
> https://www.linkedin.com/in/rigeldiscala/
>
> 1. Model Context Protocol, https://modelcontextprotocol.io/introduction
>