Reputation of Communities of Web Services - Preliminary Investigation

Web services communities can be seen as virtual clusters that agglomerate Web services with the same functionality (e.g., FlightBooking). However, selecting a community to deal with is a challenging task to users and providers. Reputation, besides other selection criteria, has been widely used for evaluating and ranking candidates. Interestingly, the definition of community reputation from the perspective of users differs from the perspective of Web service providers. In this paper, we introduce a reputation-based Web services community architecture and define some of the performance metrics that are needed to assess the reputation of a Web service community as perceived by users and providers.