An Empirical Study of Programmable Web: A Network Analysis on a Service-Mashup System

A service ecosystem consists of services and their compositions (i.e., mashups) and evolves as a complex network system. It is driven by continuously emerged new services and the mashups of old services and new ones. Complex network analysis can be a powerful tool to study the static structure as well as the evolution of a service ecosystem. This paper presents a methodology to study such a system and an empirical study of Programmable Web. To the best of our knowledge, Programmable Web is the largest and most active Web APIs and mashups collection and consists of 4337 services and 6092 service compositions by Nov-2011. We conduct a comprehensive network analysis to quantitatively characterize the static structure and dynamic evolution of the ecosystem. The findings of this paper not only can help understand the current usage pattern and the evolution trace of the ecosystem, but also are applicable to other Web service systems.