Benefits of Semantics on Web Service Composition from a Complex Network Perspective
This work addresses web service composition for developers and researchers, but it is incremental as it applies existing complex network tools to a known problem.
The authors tackled the problem of comparing syntactic and semantic approaches for web service composition by analyzing their network properties, showing that semantic networks exhibit characteristics like short average distance and community structure which should improve composition.
The number of publicly available Web services (WS) is continuously growing, and in parallel, we are witnessing a rapid development in semantic-related web technologies. The intersection of the semantic web and WS allows the development of semantic WS. In this work, we adopt a complex network perspective to perform a comparative analysis of the syntactic and semantic approaches used to describe WS. From a collection of publicly available WS descriptions, we extract syntactic and semantic WS interaction networks. We take advantage of tools from the complex network field to analyze them and determine their properties. We show that WS interaction networks exhibit some of the typical characteristics observed in real-world networks, such as short average distance between nodes and community structure. By comparing syntactic and semantic networks through their properties, we show the introduction of semantics in WS descriptions should improve the composition process.