Towards Defining and Assessing the Non-functional Properties of Communities of Web Services

This paper discusses some of the research done in the area of communities of Web services. A community allows Web services offering similar functionalities to be grouped together. One challenge that arises as a result of this grouping concerns the assessment of the level of service of the community. We refer to this level of service as Quality of Community (QoC). The QoC is important as it permits differentiating the communities from each other as well as promoting and maintaining a certain service level in preparation for receiving user requests for processing. The QoC of a community is assessed based on the QoSs of the individual Web services that reside in this community. Different attributes specific to the community such as variance, selection rate, and substitution rate define the QoC. Experiments illustrating the use of the QoC are, also, reported in this paper.