Sanjiva points out that after quite some time, somebody - in this case, Keith Chapman - took up the challenge and described my example RESTful scenario using WSDL 2.0.

Cool, and I do concede that WSDL 2.0 does a much better job than WSDL 1.1.

One of the interesting aspects is the try out page, which is generated from the WSDL. Essentially this means that metadata is used to generate the self-descriptive form; somewhat backwards from a REST perspective, but understandable given that the goal was to have an external description in the first place.

Some questions:

• How does one one describe representation formats other than XML?
• How is content negotiation supported?
• How does one describe whether a URI parameter is a query parameter, path element, or matrix parameter?
• Is there a way to describe response codes?
• What about describing hypermedia? :-)

I haven't had the time to look at the implementation in detail.