Integrated Content and Network-Based Service Clustering and Web APIs Recommendation for Mashup Development

The rapid growth in the number and diversity of Web APIs, coupled with the myriad of functionally similar Web APIs, makes it difficult to find most suitable Web APIs for users to accelerate and accomplish Mashup development. Even if the existing methods show improvements in Web APIs recommendation, it is still challenging to recommend Web APIs with high accuracy and good diversity. In this paper, we propose an integrated content and network-based service clustering and Web APIs recommendation method for Mashup development. This method, first develop a two-level topic model by using the relationship among Mashup services to mine the latent useful and novel topics for better service clustering accuracy. Moreover, based on the clustering results of Mashups, it designs a collaborative filtering (CF) based Web APIs recommendation algorithm. This algorithm, exploits the implicit co-invocation relationship between Web APIs inferred from the historical invocation history between Mashups clusters and the corresponding Web APIs, to recommend diverse Web APIs for each Mashups clusters. The method is expected to not only find much better matched Mashups with high accuracy, but also diversify the recommendation result of Web APIs with full coverage. Finally, based on a real-world dataset from ProgrammableWeb, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation to measure the performance of our method. Compared with existing methods, experimental results show that our method significantly improves the accuracy and diversity of recommendation results in terms of precision, recall, purity, entropy, DCG and HMD.