An ontological specification of a Computational Cloud

Abstract

Ontologies have gained popularity in recent times as the next generation data representation technique that allows for mapping of semantics of data in addition to its content. They have been proposed as a superior data representation technique as compared to its relational counterpart. This paper introduces an Ontology named ‘The Cloud Ontology’ (CoOn) which classifies data of the Cloud services providers. CoOn will also assist researchers in gaining a better understanding of the Cloud’s IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) layer. It allows data to be organized in a manner which represents the meaning of contents of the Cloud service providers in a format that is machine independent and intelligible. As a proof of concept three popular Cloud providers has been described using the proposed Ontology. CoOn relates similar Cloud services offered by the providers and represents their data in a simplified manner. CoOn was evaluated using SPARQL queries, CoOn is a simplified solution to the deficiencies of the relational model for representing the same data