An Exploratory Study of Web Services on the Internet

Web services technology has received much attention in the last few years, and a lot of research efforts have been devoted to utilizing services on the Internet to fulfill consumers´ requirements. However, little research has been done on the current status of web services on the Internet, which has a great impact on current research. Enlightened by this situation, we made an exploratory study of the current status of web services on the Internet. Our study mainly focused on the investigation of four aspects, including the number, complexity, quality of description and the function diversity of available web services on the Internet. A web services investigation system is built up to harvest web services from the Internet and calculate the statistical results. The investigation results are reported in this paper, and, based on our study, the development trend of web services technology is also discussed in this paper.