Managing and Querying Web Services Communities: A Survey

Abstract: With the advance of Web Services technologies and the emergence of Web Services into the information space, tremendous opportunities for empowering users and organizations appear in various application domains including electronic commerce, travel, intelligence information gathering and analysis, health care, digital government, etc. However, the technology to organize, search, integrate these Web Services has not kept pace with the rapid growth of the available information space. The number of Web Services to be integrated may be large and continuously changing. To ease and improve the process of Web services discovery in an open environment like the Internet, it is suggested to gather similar Web services into groups known as communities. Although Web services are intensively investigated, the community management issues have not been addressed yet In this paper we draw an overview of several Web services Communities' management approaches based on some currently existing communities platforms and frameworks. We also discuss different approaches for querying and selecting Web services under the umbrella of Web services communities'. We compare the current approaches among each others with respect to some key requirements.