Even Web Services Can Socialize: A New Service-Oriented Social Networking Model

The incessant growth of the number of Web services (WSs) makes their discovery more difficult. Standard discovery registries, such as UDDI and ebXML, have their own inherent limitations as they only describe the functionality aspect of each WS and not how it relates to others. Capturing the relationships between WSs as they interact with each other can be useful in many ways. In this paper, we present a novel model that captures such relationships using social networks. We describe how these WSs social networks can be initiated and how they evolve. We also discuss the types of associations (edges) that can exist among WSs (nodes). Traversing a WS social network makes it possible to identify a community of homogeneous WSs that are functionally similar. It can also enable us to use the model as a recommender system in case we need to replace a faulty WS, find a partner WS, or an add-on WS that may enrich the current business scenario.