Information Diffusion in Web Services Networks

Information diffusion has been studied between and within biosphere, microblogs, social networks, citation networks and other domains, where the network structure is present. These studies have turned to be useful for acquiring intrinsic knowledge for strategic decision making in related areas, for example, planning online campaigns in case of microblogs and blogosphere. In the context of data-centric Web services, information exchange patterns will reveal practical heuristics for efficient Web services selection and composition. For example, by possible knowledge that there is information flow between Web services of \textit{Financial Analysis Services} and \textit{Enterprise Resource Planning Services}, as outlined by our experimental results, the potential applications, which interact with \textit{Financial Analysis} services, can be adjusted to take advantage of \textit{Enterprise Resource Planning} services as well. In this paper we present a method for analyzing information diffusion between categories of data-centric Web services. The method operates on a Web services network constructed by linking interface descriptions of categorized Web services. The proposed method is evaluated on a case study of global Web services. The results indicate high potential of the proposed model in understanding interactions between categories of Web services.