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profile, location information, and social media). In the envisioned hosted
workflow system, when business consultants or engineers want to design a
new business process, they go to an online marketplace (similar to App
Store) to shop for services including atomic services and composite ones
built through workflows. Instead of downloading applications to the client
side, they compose these services and deploy the resulting workflow, both
in a hosting environment. The hosted workflow engine will coordinate the
execution of the workflow by invoking services in a predefined sequence
and provide a management interface to the users. By this means, they can
enjoy the advantages brought by the hosting environment, such as
management simplicity, elasticity, and pay-per-use economy.
9.2 WORKFLOWS EMPOWERED BY SOCIAL
COMPUTING
The proliferation of social network Web sites, such as Twitter, Face-
book, and Wikipedia, has provided a great means to connect people who
share interests and activities across various borders. These success
stories make business and scientific communities regard a social net-
work as a means for further improvement of their computing infra-
structure. Advances in social-network techniques have gained the
momentum to impact the major Internet-based computing paradigms
including services computing. Currently, social networks connect
people and groups who expose similar interests or features. In services
computing, they can connect not only people and organizations, but also
other artifacts such as software components, Web services, data, and
workflows. More importantly, social networks can record, trace, and
visualize complex relations among people and artifacts, as well as
accumulate the wisdom of crowds, which has a profound technical and
social impact. For example, by examining interaction patterns among
services, users, and providers, one can identify trusted or reputable
service providers or partners to share resources. ProgrammableWeb
(http://www.programmableweb.com/) and myExperiment are two
social network sites that share Web services and processes, in business
and scientific domains, respectively. Some preliminary work has been
done by leveraging social network analysis in services computing, as
discussed in Chapter 8 as an example, and we expect more advances in
this direction in the near future.
