Extending Service Models to Include Social Metadata

Abstract

As SOA matures the number of services made available on the Web increases steadily. At the same time, Web 2.0 allows people to easily combine content from different sources and to create mashups, which are becoming a new service species, mainly generated by users. In this paper, we extend and enhance service descriptions by involving users and including information related to their views and behavior. We borrow ideas and extend the models and practices for the annotation of Web content and information resources that has recently become popular in widely-used social platforms. This means that users are encouraged to describe in their own terms the services they use. As this metadata emerges directly or indirectly from the users, we call them social metadata or social semantics. In this context collective intelligence emerges dynamically and in a bottom-up fashion from the social metadata of the services. Our approach aims at strengthening the user participation in the Web and more generally in the service industry by providing service metadata, which are later used as a form of lightweight user-side semantic annotation of services. This annotation is provided directly and explicitly by the users and/or implicitly by identifying patterns in the users' behavior. This type of service annotation acts supplementary to the description of services initially provided by the service providers and is linked to the actual use of the services in the real world. We can harvest the extracted knowledge and use it for improving the search for services on the Web or for facilitating the clustering of services. The final goal remains to improve service quality through active and collective participation in the service description process.