This is my understanding of requirement :
A REST-ful webservice should be developed as a independent, loose coupled and reusable utility service. The primary goal of this REST API is to provide the metadata of
a particular database (I assume MySQL is used in assignment) i.e. data base name, version, operating system on which DB is hosted, table information (table name, coulmns, contstrains, names etc),
indexes, sequences etc.
A service can offer multiple operations like getDataBaseInformation, getDataBaseTables, getDataBaseTableInformation etc. to fetch different metadata about DB OR one globale method which returns the whole DB metadata.
A use case I can think of this service is to enable DB clients to discover and fetch the information about the database dynamically and query tables. This decouples DB clients from the physical details of database and lets to evolve independently.
As a general standard practice, the source should be able to compile, build and package with maven tool.