Composite Web Services Formation Using a Social Network of Web Services: A Preliminary Investigation

A composite Web service, such as arranging a travel to a conference, can be viewed as a project team that is comprised of several members who want to collaborate in order to accomplish a specific goal. In this work, we propose an algorithm for searching a social network of Web services in order to select an effective set of Web services that can collaborate in order to attain the main goal of the composite Web service at hand. Ultimately, the selection algorithm takes into consideration the set of functions that each Web services member possesses, e.g., hotel booking, car rental, etc., and the communication cost among these members. Our goal is to secure all the functions required by the composite Web service yet minimizing the communication overhead. The preliminary design of the experiments and the future work are described. © 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd