On the Social Aspects of Personalized Ranking for Web Services

Ranking is an important step once automated discovery in Web Services is enabled, it allows for automated selection of the best matched service, out of the discovered ones. However, automated selection of the best matched service is not as simple as it may look like. Different service consumers may have different preferences to select the service providers, which may even depend upon their past interactions. Various approaches have been proposed that allow ranking of services based on different functional and non-functional aspects. However, we believe that the selection of services based on the analysis of the past interactions of service consumers or their social-network could be another effective way to rank the services for the benefit of service consumers. In this paper, we present a community-aware personalized approach for recommending and ranking Web Services for a service consumer. It is based on analysis of historical interactions among service consumers and service providers. We perform analysis and mining on the log information of service consumers and service providers, model their past interactions as social network, apply standard social-network analysis techniques, and use this information in ranking Web Services.