Commitments to Regulate Social Web Services Operation

This paper discusses how social Web services are held responsible for the actions they take at run time. Compared to (regular) Web services, social Web services perform different actions, for instance establishing and maintaining networks of contacts and forming with some privileged contacts strong and long lasting collaborative groups. Assessing these actions´ outcomes, to avoid any violation, occurs through commitments that the social Web services are required to bind to. Two types of commitments are identified: social commitments that guarantee the proper use of the social networks in which the social Web services sign up, and business commitments that guarantee the proper development of composite Web services in response to users´ requests. Detecting commitment violation and action prohibition using monitoring results in imposing sanctions on the “guilty” social Web services and taking corrective actions. A system for commitment management in terms of definition, binding, monitoring, and violation detection is also discussed in this paper.