Abstract

With the emergence of Web 2.0 and its applications, social
networks have facilitated the discovery process of web services, a
cornerstone to the development of service computing. Very
recently, some frameworks have suggested adding a social element
to services' description, discovery, binding and composition. By
incorporating the social component in the Service-Oriented
Architecture, web services become active entities that can form
and be part of social networks. However, merging users and web
services in the same social network and analyzing the influence of
these entities (i.e., web services and users) on each other have
not been examined in the previous proposals and yet to be
investigated.

In this thesis, we propose a new social network-based framework
for analyzing the role and influence of users and web services in
the discovery process. We advocate the idea of incorporating, not
only social web services, but also social users in the discovery
process by merging users and web services nodes in the same global
social network. We first discuss the engineering process of such a
social network that takes into consideration users and web
services characteristics and the types of their interactions.
Thereafter, we analyze those types of interactions that fall in
one of two categories: web service discovery or user discovery.
The goal is to involve social networks of users in the service
discovery process and allow web services to be active parts by
advertising and introducing themselves to other users. Simulation
results show that the proposed approach provides an immediate and
wider exposure for web services and makes the discovery easier and
efficient.