Benefits of Semantics on Web Service Composition from a Complex Network Perspective

TL;DR

This paper compares syntactic and semantic web service interaction networks using complex network analysis, demonstrating that semantics enhance the quality and efficiency of web service composition.

Contribution

It introduces a complex network perspective to analyze and compare syntactic and semantic web service descriptions, highlighting the benefits of semantics in service composition.

Findings

Semantic networks show shorter average path lengths.

Semantic descriptions improve community structure.

Networks exhibit properties of real-world complex networks.

Abstract

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.