A Novel Ontology-based Approach for Describing Cloud Services

Abstract

The development of Cloud computing led to an increase in the number of services ready for use and therefore the number of consumers’ requests. Cloud providers advertise the description of their offered services in different formats on the Internet. This makes the discovery and selection of services more difficult for users. Thus, a uniform description of Cloud services would be needed. The aim of this study is to provide a new ontology for uniform description of Cloud services coming from heterogeneous sources. The proposed model takes into account the different relationships and dependencies between services across Cloud’s layers. These dependencies are represented by the different constraints of composition and deployment. To validate our proposal, qualitative and quantitative evaluations are conducted. The qualitative evaluation is carried out by making comparisons with both state-of-the-art works and the Bitnami platform according to some criteria. For the quantitative evaluation, comparisons are performed with the output results specified by users. Globally, the results are promising and encouraging.