Abstract

This paper presents the design and evaluation of SerViz – a tool to support the visualisation of web service collections. The increasing number of web services available on the Internet highlights the need for an effective method of discovering these web services. Existing web service discovery methods do not, however, effectively support the user in finding suitable web services. Two information visualisation (IV) techniques, namely a network and tree IV technique, were used to visualise a large web service collection. A user study was conducted to compare these IV techniques. Participants provided high ratings for overall satisfaction for both IV techniques and low ratings for perceived cognitive load. Participants found both IV techniques easy to use and easy to learn. The results of the user study show that SerViz supports effective visual web service discovery. While the tree IV technique was faster for browsing for web services, the network IV technique was faster for searching.

Highlights

  • As the number of available web services on the Internet increases, finding suitable web services becomes a challenging task (Sabou and Pan 2007)

  • Workload Results The results were similar for both views for cognitive load except that participants found that the network view required significantly more effort (Figure 3)

  • Two information visualisation (IV) techniques, namely the network and tree IV techniques were implemented in SerViz to determine which IV technique better supports visual web service discovery

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Summary

Introduction

As the number of available web services on the Internet increases, finding suitable web services becomes a challenging task (Sabou and Pan 2007). Developing an effective method of discovering these services is essential. Web service discovery is concerned with searching for web services that are specific to a user’s requirements. Existing web service discovery methods do not effectively support the user in finding suitable web services (Beets and Wesson 2010). The current techniques provide textual lists that the user is required to explore and manually evaluate to select appropriate web services. Minimal information is made available to distinguish between web services of similar functionality. Web service discovery can become time-consuming and ineffective

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