OSDB CLI User Guide

OSDB is a Smart Agent that distills and aggregates Actions described by any API that's documented using at least one of the following open standards:

• OpenAPI (formerly Swagger)
• RDF (using notations such as RDF-Turtle, JSON-LD, RDFa and others)

It acts as an HTTP-compliant proxy that provides RESTful interaction with all of the aggregated Actions.

Actions can be executed by three routes:

• through the OSDB UI using a browser
• through the OSDB REST API from a client application
• through the OSDB CLI using the OSDB Client  or a third-party application with an OSDB binding (e.g. Facebook Messenger)

The brief guidelines below relate to using the last of the above, the OSDB CLI.

To discover what Actions are associated with a Web Service Description, you need to follow the interaction sequence below.

Service Discovery Commands

help [-u | --url_only]

• Returns this help text.
• Option -u or --url_only returns a link to a web page containing this help.
  Note: This option may be applied automatically if using a chatbot client (e.g. Messenger) which severely limits the maximum length of text responses.

services

• Lists the services that have been registered with the bot.

load {service_description_url} 

• Loads and registers a Web Service (identified by its URI/URL) with the bot.
  Note: The Web Service description must be provided by an RDF document using a variety of notations (one of: Nanotation, RDF-Turtle or JSON-LD) using terms from the Schema.org and OpenLink Web Services vocabularies.

load {service_description_url} as {service_id} 

• Loads and registers a Web Service (identified by its URI/URL) with the bot using service_id to designate the service name registered with the bot.
  Note: service_id overrides the Service Name used in the original Web Service Description and it has to be a single word rather than a phrase.

unload {service_id} 

• Unloads (or de-registers) a Service Description identified by the given ID.

{service_id} actions 

• Lists the actions supported by a Web Service registered with the bot.

Action Discovery and Usage

Discovery

To discover how one invokes a specific Action, i.e. reveal its call patterns (or signature), simply perform one of the statements that follow:

{action_id} -h 

{service_id} {action_id} -h

{service_id}.{action_id} -h 

Note: service_id can be omitted if action_id is unique across all services.

Usage

You instruct the bot to perform an Action by presenting it with one of the following statements, representing its invocation signature:

{action_id} {action parameters} 

{service_id} {action_id} {action parameters} 

{service_id}.{action_id} {action parameters} 

Note: service_id can be omitted if action_id is unique across all services.