Web Service Recommendation with Reconstructed Profile from Mashup Descriptions

Abstract

Web services are self-contained software components that support business process automation over the Internet, and mashup is a popular technique that creates value-added service compositions to fulfill complicated business requirements. For mashup developers, looking for desired component services from a sea of service candidates is often challenging. Therefore, web service recommendation has become a highly demanding technique. Traditional approaches, however, mostly rely on static and potentially subjectively described texts offered by service providers. In this paper, we propose a novel way of dynamically reconstructing objective service profiles based on mashup descriptions, which carry historical information of how services are used in mashups. Our key idea is to leverage mashup descriptions and structures to discover important word features of services and bridge the vocabulary gap between mashup developers and service providers. Specifically, we jointly model mashup descriptions and component service using author topic model in order to reconstruct service profiles. Exploiting word features derived from the reconstructed service profiles, a new service recommendation algorithm is developed. Experiments over a real-world data set from ProgrammableWeb.com demonstrate that our proposed service recommendation algorithm is effective and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.Note to Practitioners-Service recommendation accuracy for mashup creation is often limited due to poor quality of service descriptions. Mashup descriptions contain valuable information about functions and features of its component services, which can be leveraged to enhance descriptive quality of original service profiles. Based on the assumption, this paper proposes a novel two-phase service recommendation framework to facilitate mashup creation. Specifically, our approach reconstructs service profiles by extracting appropriate words from historical mashup descriptions. Then, a novel service recommendation algorithm is developed by exploiting popularity and relevance measures hidden in the reconstructed profiles. Moreover, we propose the rules of dominant words discovery and employ it to further refine our algorithm.