  The evolution analysis on Web service ecosystems has become a critical
problem as the frequency of service changes on the Internet increases rapidly.
Developers need to understand these evolution patterns to assist in their
decision-making on service selection. ProgrammableWeb is a popular Web service
ecosystem on which several evolution analyses have been conducted in the
literature. However, the existing studies have ignored the quality issues of
the ProgrammableWeb dataset and the issue of service obsolescence. In this
study, we first report the quality issues identified in the ProgrammableWeb
dataset from our empirical study. Then, we propose a novel method to correct
the relevant evolution analysis data by estimating the life cycle of
application programming interfaces (APIs) and mashups. We also reveal how to
use three different dynamic network models in the service ecosystem evolution
analysis based on the corrected ProgrammableWeb dataset. Our experimental
experience iterates the quality issues of the original ProgrammableWeb and
highlights several research opportunities.
