Follow the leader: A social network approach for service communities

Abstract

Web services partake in various types of interactions during their lifetime such as recommendation, substitution, and composition, hence giving rise to social behaviors. In this paper, we propose a socialaware approach for service communities. Communities are built around socially active services called leaders. The remaining services, called followers, use past interactions to elect their leaders and join communities. We introduce a clustering algorithm for multi-relation networks and define heuristics to identify community leaders and followers. We also define a new metric, called interoperability degree, to determine the degree to which members of a community are likely to socially interact. We conduct experiments to illustrate that leveraging social behaviors may help clump together services that are suited to interoperate.