A Study of Semantic Web Services Network

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Loosely coupled and cross-platform features make Web services accessible and increasingly popular on the Internet. However, efficient service discovery and automated service composition are still challenges under the conventional practice where services are organized into categories. In this paper, we propose a graph-based method to organize Web services into a service ecosystem interlaced with service relationships at the semantic level. First, Web services are modelled as a set of interfaces, whose input and output parameters are annotated with well-defined ontologies. Secondly, semantic associations and interactions between Web services are mined, and services are constructed into a Web services network (SN), a variant of bipartite graph, by projecting the functional aspects of concrete Web services onto the abstract service layer. Thirdly, from the complex network perspective, the services relations are investigated and the structure of SN is analysed. To demonstrate the basic topological properties of SN, an empirical study is conducted on two data sets for comparative purposes, 10 000+ Web services collected from the Internet and 1231 Web services provided by Titan system of Zhejiang University. The experimental results reveal that SNs, which are built by different data sets on the semantic level, exhibit the same features such as small-world and scale-free. In addition, our results yield valuable insight for developing service discovery and automated composition algorithms, and characterizing the evolution of the entire Web service ecosystem.