HyperService: Linking and Exploring Services on the Web

Abstract

Web is becoming a programmable platform, with countless services blooming everyday in various forms like Feeds, REST APIs and Widgets, etc. Although the existing technologies, such as Mashups, have reduced the challenges to build new applications by composing these services, it's still far from enabling the non-technical users to solve their situational problems by correlating and consuming these services. In this paper, we present our HyperService technology, which empowers a much more flexible way to link and explore existing services for solving various situational problems. In HyperService, the service metadata, service linkages and user behaviors are indexed and managed; Based on the user’s input keywords and navigation context, a group of relevant services are dynamically searched, ranked and recommended for facilitating future navigations; the service navigation is smoothed by a web2.0 style exploratory user interface. A prototype system is also presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our HyperService research work.