This talk presents our research on Web services for the last ten years. Different projects have been carried out including context-aware Web services, policy-based management of Web services, communities of Web services, and recently social Web services that are the focus of this talk. Web services have heavily changed the way software engineers develop today’s business applications. Organizations can now have an operative presence on the Internet through Business-to-Customer (B2C) and/or Business-to-Business (B2B) Web services. Despite the widespread use of Web services, some important issues remain unresolved such as where to advertise Web services for better and immediate exposure, how to discover Web services with respect to users’ needs, and how to replace Web services when they fail. These issues are addressed from a technical perspective without relying for instance, on the development opportunities offered by social computing. Social computing through Web 2.0 applications and tools has given the Internet a major push by capitalizing on the willingness of users to share, collaborate, and recommend. These different forms of interactions illustrate to a certain extent the principle of “I offer services that somebody else may need” and “I require services that somebody else may offer” upon which service-oriented computing is built. Service offers and requests illustrate how people behave in today’s society imposing a social dimension on the exploitation of Web services. Social Web services are the result of blending social computing with service-oriented computing. They ``know’’ with whom they worked in the past and with whom they would like to work in the future. This talk reviews the research progress we made in social Web services in terms of building social networks of Web services, discovering Web services using these social networks, and last but not least labeling Web services and communities of Web services with social qualities such as selfishness, trustworthiness, and spitefulness. Prior to concluding the talk, an overview of our current research projects on applying social Web services’ principles to cloud computing and business process modeling and coordination will be presented.

Bio: Dr Zakaria Maamar is a Professor in the College of Technological Innovation at Zayed University in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. His research interests are primarily related to service-oriented computing, context-aware computing, and enterprise application interoperability. Dr. Maamar has published several peer-reviewed papers in journals and conferences and regularly serves on the program and organizing committees of several international conferences and workshops. Dr. Maamar graduated for his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Computer Sciences from Laval University in Canada in 1995 and 1998, respectively.