I. Introduction
Having been introduced more than twenty years ago, web services remain the primary state-of-the-practice approach for applications to request data or functionality from cloud-based servers over the Internet. RapidAPI [1] and ProgrammableWeb [2], the two most popular web service markets, each provides 30K and 24K registered web services, respectively, to serve over 400,000 developers [3]. Many of these web services provide similar functionalities. For example, the RapidAPI team manually cluster 516 set of APIs that provide similar functionalities [4]. Examples of these collections include: 19 APIs [5] related to real-time or historical flight data, 52 APIs [6] related to image processing and facial recognition, 14 APIs related to sending emails and validating email addresses [7]. Some of these APIs provide equivalent functionalities and can be used interchangeably.
Web Service Recommendation Workflow