  Along with a continuously growing number of publicly available Web services
(WS), we are witnessing a rapid development in semantic-related web
technologies, which lead to the apparition of semantically described WS. In
this work, we perform a comparative analysis of the syntactic and semantic
approaches used to describe WS, from a complex network perspective. First, we
extract syntactic and semantic WS dependency networks from a collection of
publicly available WS descriptions. Then, we take advantage of tools from the
complex network field to analyze them and determine their topological
properties. We show WS dependency networks exhibit some of the typical
characteristics observed in real-world networks, such as small world and scale
free properties, as well as community structure. By comparing syntactic and
semantic networks through their topological properties, we show the
introduction of semantics in WS description allows modeling more accurately the
dependencies between parameters, which in turn could lead to improved
composition mining methods.
