Employing graph network analysis for web service composition

The Web services paradigm has enabled an increasing number of providers to host remotely accessible services. However, the true potential of such a distributed infrastructure can only be reached when such autonomic services can be combined together as parts of a workflow, in order to collectively achieve combined functionality. In this paper we present our work in the area of automatic workflow composition among Web services with semantically described functionality capabilities. For this purpose, we use a set of heuristics derived from the connectivity structure of the service repository in order to effectively guide the composition process. The methodologies presented in this paper have been inspired by research in areas such as graph network analysis, social network analysis and bibliometrics. In addition, we present comparative experimentation results in order to evaluate the presented techniques. © 2009, IGI Global.