Contribute, and help us improving the community!

The seekda Web Services platform allows it's visitors to actively take part in the community by contributing through providing Service annotations.

An active community improves the general usability and experience of the portal, providing an efficient interface for developers seeking particular Services. Furthermore it enables Service Providers to present their Services to the community, get feedback and use it as a valuable base for further improvements.

Currently, the annotation possibilites and community features within portal include:

• Service Category, Categorize a Service to clarify it's context (such as Communication, Finance, Biology, etc). Categories are bsaed on the Service-Finder Service Category Ontology.
• Related Documents and Document Type, In addition to the actual Service description (for WSDL Services), we also outline all the documents that have been classified by the crawler as being related to a particular Service. Users are able to specify the type of document in question, along a predefined set of Document Types (e.g. Pricing List, Documentation Page, etc).
• Free-Form Tags, Portal users are able to specify free form tags which are used to further extend the categorization possibilities with additional information and improve the search process.
• Text Description, In case the description provided by Service Providers is insufficient or non existent, it can be provided or extended by the community.
• Rating, Services as well as Providers can be rated by portal visitors as well as registered users.
• Mashups, Users can now list their own mashup for a particular service. Usually, this would be a link to an application available on the Web, re-using this particular service. A very simple example would be a personal Homepage that includes a weather widget through a Web Service. Another example would be a platform that uses the Twitter API for data mining of interesting topics (e.g., sentiment analysis for new products), a Homepage that uses Google Maps, or a (Web) application that combines several APIs to one new service.
• Examples, Examples are meant to be small snippets, provided by the community in a wiki-like manner, covering implementation issues, invocation examples or generally helpful bits of information for developers.
• Service Cost, Specifies whether a particular Service is free to use, or not - i.e a certain fee has to be paid to use the Service.

The annotation possibilites and community features of the portal will be improved in a cyclic approach in which we try to involve the community in our decisions as much as possible. This leads to a variety of benefits for Service Providers as well as Users:

Benefits for Platform Users and Developers

• Improved usability, General improvements of the design and functionality, respecting the feedback and suggestions of our users, help building a solid and convenient interface for the Web Service community and everyone interested in the topic.
• Improved Search/Navigation, Integrating service categories and cost information is an important im provement. It allows to explicitly categorize services in a predefined ontology, allowing advanced search possibilities such as browsing through service categories. Another important improvement is the identification and distinction between free and commercial or paid services. This is a relevant information for users that are interested in actually using a service within their application or mashup.
• Mashup integration, The possibility for users to list their mashup directly on the platform, yields some very valuable aspects:
  • - Users are able to advertise their implementation directly on the service details page, and as a result attract more visitors.
  • - Users can directly view implementations of a particular service in action. This helps understanding the possibilities of a service, which are often not immediately visible from its description.
  • - The number of mashup using a specific service can be used as a metric for ranking and service popularity in our search results.
• Implementation Details, With the possibility to add examples or other implementation details in a wiki- like manner, we give our users the chance to actively discuss and help others by providing their solutions to particular problems or experience with the implementation of a specific service.

Benefits for Service Providers

• Service Feedback, General feedback helps understanding why, for what, and in which context developers are using Services.
• Mashup Integration, Getting an impression of how their services are used, how popular they are and which parts are specifically used, can be very important for Service Providers.
• User Behavior, Providers can gain insight in user behaviour, such as seeing popular searches, hot topics, and more.
• User interaction, Getting in contact with users that frequently visit and/or that annotate/comment their services can be a very valuable source of feedback.
• Service Improvement, Service providers are able to improve their services in a cyclic approach by letting users periodically evaluate their services and share their experience.