A snapshot of public web services

Web Service Technology has been developing rapidly as it provides a flexible application-to-application interaction mechanism. Several ongoing research efforts focus on various aspects of web service technology including the modeling, specification, discovery, composition and verification of web services. The approaches advocated are often conflicting-based as they are on differing expectations on the current status of web services as well as differing models of their future evolution. One way of deciding the relative relevance of the various research directions is to look at their applicability to the currently available web services. To this end, we took a snapshot of the currently publicly available web services. Our aim is to get an idea of the number, type, complexity and composability of these web services and see if this analysis provides useful information about the near-term fruitful research directions.