DSES: A Blockchain-Powered Decentralized Service Eco-System

Existing service ecosystems typically rely on some centralized service registries (e.g., ProgrammableWeb.com) as "middle people" to record service behaviors thus to provide service ranking and recommendation. Excessive centralization increasingly becomes the bottleneck and hinders the further growth of the service ecosystems. As the first attempt to apply the fundamental technique underneath the emerging Bitcoin network into the field of service oriented computing, this paper proposes to build a service ecosystem as a decentralized blockchain-oriented service network, called Decentralized Service Eco-System (DSES). Whenever any activity occurs in the system (e.g., APIs are used together in a published mashup), all involved parties will individually store and maintain a copy of the detailed record (provenance) at their local databases. Such a distributed database-oriented solution will enable services who do not fully trust each other to maintain a set of global states. In this way, service discovery and recommendation can be realized in a distributed manner that promises higher scalability and maintainability. As a proof of concept, a prototyping system of DSES is constructed using the real-world data from ProgrammableWeb.com, based on the INKchain, a newly open-source consortium blockchain mechanism extending the Hyperledger Fabric.