A Unified Conceptual Framework for Managing Services in the Web Oriented Architecture

In recent years, there has been an increasing adoption of the agile paradigm for developing data-intensive web applications, relying on the selection and reuse of third party components. In parallel, the Web Oriented Architecture (WOA) has emerged, gathering together the notions underneath Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), REpresentation State Transfer (REST) and web applications. In particular, WOA has promoted the success of: a) RESTful services for access to web data sources, and b) public repositories where these data providing services, in the form of Web APIs, are made available to the community of developers. In this context, it is more and more relevant to support the developers, even operating in community networks, to select from available repositories suitable APIs for their development needs. Nevertheless, recent selection approaches considered different features, complementary and only partially overlapping, among the ones used for service descriptions in the repositories. In this chapter a conceptual framework is defined that considers all the features to enable a flexible selection of data providing services over multiple repositories. To this aim, the framework provides: (i) a multi-perspective model for service description, that also includes a social-based perspective, focused on the community of developers, their mutual relationships and their estimated credibility in web application development; (ii) a collection of search and ranking techniques that rely on the model; (iii) a prototype system that implements the unified conceptual framework on top of service repositories.