Detection of Web Service substitutability and composability

Web services are used in software applications as a standard and convenient way of accessing remote applications over the Internet. Web services can be thought of as remote procedure calls. This paper proposes an approach to determine web service substitutability and composability. Because web services may be unreliable, finding other services substitutable for an existing one can increase application uptime. Finding composable services enables applications to be programmed by composing several web services (using one service’s output as an input to another web service). We have implemented our technique and evaluated it on 14 freely available web services producing 92 outputs. Our approach correctly detects all composable and substitutable web services from this set.