A Framework for Web Service Usage Profiles Discovery

As part of web services life-cycle, providers frequently face decision about changes without a clear understanding of the impact on their clients. The identification of clients´ consumption patterns constitute invaluable information to support more effective decisions. In this paper, we present a framework that supports the discovery of service usage profiles, to bring awareness on the distinct groups of consumers, and their usage characterization in terms of detailed service functionality. The framework encompasses monitoring of clients requests, constituting a general purpose Usage Database, and a process to cluster client applications and derive usage profiles. The paper details the framework and presents experiments.