Discovering Homogeneous Web Service Community in the User-Centric Web Environment

The Web has undergone a tremendous change toward a highly user-centric environment. Millions of users can participate and collaborate for their own interests and benefits. Services computing paradigm together with the proliferation of Web services have created great potential opportunities for the users, also known as service consumers, to produce value-added services by means of service discovery and composition. In this paper, we propose an efficient approach to facilitating the service consumer on discovering Web services. First, we analyze the service discovery requirements from the service consumer´s perspective and outline a conceptual model of homogeneous Web service communities. The homogeneous service community contains two types of discovery: the search of similar operations and that of composible operations. Second, we describe a similarity measurement model for Web services by leveraging the metadata from WSDL, and design a graph-based algorithm to support both of the two discovery types. Finally, adopting the popular atom feeds, we design a prototype to facilitate the consumers to discover while subscribing Web services in an easy-of-use manner. With the experimental evaluation and prototype demonstration, our approach not only alleviates the consumers from time-consuming discovery tasks but also lowers their entry barrier in the user-centric Web environment.