Using Social Networks for Web Services Discovery

Service engineers often struggle to locate the relevant Web services needed to satisfy users´ requests. The authors describe how service engineers can capitalize on Web services´ interactions - namely, collaboration, substitution, and competition - to build social networks for service discovery. Through these networks, Web services identify those peers with which they´d like to work, those that can replace them in case of failure, and those that compete against them for selection. Building a Web service´s social network requires six steps, which the article describes.