Using Information Visualisation to Support Visual Web Service Discovery

This paper presents the design and evaluation of SerViz -- a tool to support the visualisation of web service collections. The increasing number of web services available on the Internet highlights the need for an effective method of discovering these web services. Existing web service discovery methods do not, however, effectively support the user in finding suitable web services. Two information visualisation (IV) techniques, namely a network and tree IV technique, were used to visualise a large web service collection. A user study was conducted to compare these IV techniques. Participants provided high ratings for overall satisfaction for both IV techniques and low ratings for perceived cognitive load. Participants found both IV techniques easy to use and easy to learn. The results of the user study show that SerViz supports effective visual web service discovery. While the tree IV technique was faster for browsing for web services, the network IV technique was faster for searching.