Learning to Build Accurate Service Representations and Visualization

With the boom of Web services, there is a growing need for visualizing service ecosystems to help people browse services and understand their functionalities and positions in the systems. One foundational step of building a proper visualization is to ensure accurate representations for the comprising services. However, it is not a trivial task as service profiles may not be sufficient for two significant reasons. First, while the services themselves being used in various scenarios, their profiles may not always precisely reflect all of them. Second, service profiles usually comprise quite a few universal background terms that cannot distinguish services. To address these two issues, we apply machine learning techniques to incrementally learn service representations in a whole. A tailored topic model is developed, named Service Representation-Latent Dirichlet Allocation (SR-LDA). The core idea is to learn more comprehensive and up-to-date information about services from the profiles of the involved service compositions (i.e., mashup profiles), while introducing a global filter to identify and filter out background terms. Both quantitative and qualitative experiments on a real-world dataset demonstrate that the proposed SR-LDA builds higher-quality service representations comparing with baselines. We further generate a knowledge map to visualize a service ecosystem based on the learned service representations. Such a knowledge map directly leads to the detection of four typical functionality patterns of Web services and serves the purpose of mashup creation.