  The semantic Web service community develops efforts to bring semantics to Web
service descriptions and allow automatic discovery and composition. However,
there is no widespread adoption of such descriptions yet, because semantically
defining Web services is highly complicated and costly. As a result, production
Web services still rely on syntactic descriptions, key-word based discovery and
predefined compositions. Hence, more advanced research on syntactic Web
services is still ongoing. In this work we build syntactic composition Web
services networks with three well known similarity metrics, namely Levenshtein,
Jaro and Jaro-Winkler. We perform a comparative study on the metrics
performance by studying the topological properties of networks built from a
test collection of real-world descriptions. It appears Jaro-Winkler finds more
appropriate similarities and can be used at higher thresholds. For lower
thresholds, the Jaro metric would be preferable because it detect less
irrelevant relationships.
