Towards a community-based, social network-driven framework for Web services management

•We propose a framework to manage Web services taking part in compositions.•This management is built upon community concept and social network metaphor.•We use social networks for capturing all intra and inter community interactions.•The proposed social networks include substitution, competition, and recommendation.•The mining exercise over these social networks results in assigning social qualities to services.

This paper discusses a framework to manage Web services using the concept of community and the metaphor of social networking. On the one hand, a community gathers Web services that offer similar functionalities together. These Web services are referred to as either master or slave. On the other hand, social networking captures all interactions that occur between Web services located in the same or separate communities. Five interactions are identified and referred to as supervision, substitution, competition, collaboration, and recommendation. The mining exercise over the social networks that capture these interactions results in assigning social qualities to Web services, similar to those found in people’s daily life such as selfishness, fairness, and trustworthiness. Experiments showing the mining exercise are also reported in this paper.