Quality of Experience: User's Perception about Web Services

Web service composition enables seamless and dynamic integration of Web services. The behavior of participant Web services determines the overall performance of a composition. Therefore, it is important to choose high quality services for service composition. Existing Web service selection and discovery approaches rely on non-functional aspects (also known as quality of service or QoS) e.g., response time and availability. Though these parameters are crucial for selecting Web services, they may not reflect the user’s perspective of quality. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of incorporating perceived quality from user’s perspective for service selection and composition. We name such quality attributes as quality of experience (QoE). First, we propose a solution that automatically mines and identifies QoE attributes from the Web. Second, we study the application of such dynamically extracted QoE attributes for service selection. For the evaluation purpose, we collected more than 34,000 reviews from 58 different services in six domains. Our findings show that it is possible to automatically identify QoE attributes with an average precision and recall of 92% and 80% respectively. Our study shows that there is a strong positive correlation between QoS and QoE. Hence QoE can be used during service selection especially when QoS data are not available. Furthermore, we found 70% of service discovery queries indeed contain QoE attributes showing the importance of QoE attributes during the service discovery phase. Our study also finds 80% of service selection is based on QoE attributes of a service.